The Civil Guard has arrested this Wednesday a woman in the Baraja’s airport for carrying around 30 kilos of live eels in his luggage.
The fish was in eight small corchopan refrigerators camouflaged in two suitcases that were detected by the Automated Baggage Handling System when the alleged trafficker, a Malaysian national, made a stopover in Madrid on the flight that took her from Casablanca (Morocco) to Nouakchott (Mauritania).
The baby eel It is the only fingerling allowed by Spanish fishing laws, but its export outside of Spain is completely prohibited. Although the eel is in itself a extremely expensive food -at Christmas it can easily exceed 1000 euros per kilo-, it is exported illegally mainly with the aim of fattening it, since adult eel is a highly prized food in the Asian market.
World eel traffic
Last September, within the framework of the operation ASKEA–LAKE carried out under the coordination of EUROPOL, the Civil Guard arrested 29 people and seized 180 kilos of eel with a value on the black market that could reach 270,000 euros.
As part of this operation, close to 3000 controls and inspections, in ports, airports and communication routes. The majority of criminal and administrative offenses correspond to crimes of illegal fishing, crimes of possession and illegal trafficking of protected species and violations of the regulations on natural spaces.
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As the Civil Guard explains, after the covid-19 pandemic, and the resumption of conventional air traffic, arrests like the one practiced today have returned. This is by no means an isolated case. The authorities have located shell companies expressly constituted with the purpose of camouflaging among the exports of another type of refrigerated food, eels.
This illegal activity, says the Benemérita, is led by Criminal organizations perfectly structured, which increasingly adopt greater security measures to facilitate transit between countries and avoid police control. In this way, the use of different departure routes is becoming more frequent, with airports as far away from the point of origin of the fishing as Serbia, Macedonia or other Eastern European countries.
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