Five restaurant employees and a maintenance worker at Barcelona Airport have been arrested for helping migrants to irregularly enter and stay in the Schengen area by avoiding border controls at the airport.
According to the police, dozens of migrants could enter Spain illegally through this scheme, which intended to pass them off as authorised airport personnel.
Detectives said that migrants paid large amounts of money to the gang in order to be smuggled into Spain and then be able to move through the borderless zone freely. The authorities also revealed that the main suspects were a couple that managed a restaurant in Terminal 1 of Barcelona airport, serving travellers for more than a decade.
Accuses of 20 separate crimes weigh on the five arrested detainees, which mainly include irregular migration, while detectives believe that the scale of the operation could have been greater.
These people knew they couldn’t get the documents they needed to enter Spain, like valid visas legally. 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 same reveals that the gang’s help was crucial for migrants as they even accompanied them along corridors where only airport workers were allowed.
The suspected also offered migrants uniforms and clothes that they had put in toilets to wear, disguising themselves as airport employees.
Spain is largely attacked by migrants, especially in 2018, as arrivals doubled to 57,000 while the number of arrivals in the EU scored a record low for a five-year period.
However, in 2020, the second-highest number of arrivals by sea for the two-decade period was recorded. Partially, this occurred due to the sharp drop in arrivals from Morocco as the Spanish government was dealing with a crisis after the Melilla fence tragedy in the previous year.
Migration routes are constantly changing, and if the route via Tunisia becomes more complicated, dangerous, and expensive – as might be the case given the efforts of the Tunisian government to curb migration – more migrants may seek to cross to Europe via Morocco.
The authorities in Morocco revealed that at least 23 sub-Saharan Africans died in the Melilla tragedy as they tried to fence and enter the Spanish territory. This event brought Europe’s immigration controls to attention and its relationship with North Africa under scrutiny.
