Spanish police have arrested a gang accused of smuggling migrants into Europe disguised as airport workers whose final destinations were supposed to be countries like Ireland.
Four Barcelona Airport restaurant employees and a janitor have been held on suspicion of helping the migrants avoid transit area border controls with security passes and work uniforms they allegedly sold them.
Police have admitted the cunning scheme designed to pass them off as authorised airport personnel was novel and could have led to dozens of migrants getting into the country.
Ireland has been signalled as one of the places they said they were heading when they started their journeys before cutting them short when they reached the Catalan capital.
Detectives say they paid “large sums of money” to the gang accused of smuggling them into Spain and giving them unhindered access to Europe’s Schengen area.
The two suspected gang leaders have been described by police as a couple who managed a well-established Barcelona Airport terminal 1 restaurant that had been open for more than ten years.
The five detainees were arrested on suspicion of 22 separate crimes of facilitating illegal immigration, although privately detectives admit they believe the scale of the operation could have been far greater.
A spokesperson for the National Police in Barcelona, confirming the arrests and explaining the migrants were all people who should have remained in transit areas between flights from and to “non-Schengen countries” said: “These people knew they couldn’t get the documents they needed to legally enter Spain, like valid visas.
“The detainees offered the migrants airport employee cards they could use to pretend they were workers and leave the international transit area without going through any border checkpoints.
“The gang’s help was fundamental, given that the alleged members even accompanied them along corridors that were restricted only to airport workers.
“They also offered them uniforms and other clothes they put on in places like toilets to pass themselves off as airport employees.”
They added that phase one of the three-phase operation began in March with the arrest of the first suspect, when detectives realised the ruse they had discovered could be “the tip of the iceberg”.
The spokesperson for the police force said: “Investigators were able to observe there was a certain type of profile of the traveller who passed through Barcelona with the pretext of continuing his or her journey towards other countries, like Turkey or Ireland, when in reality they were intending to enter Spain fraudulently."
