The Judge of Violence against Children and Adolescents of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria has ordered this Thursday the closure of a center with 148 immigrant minors in Arinaga, in the southeast of the island, in an extension of the investigations on the reception resources that the association Quórum Social 77 manages for the Government of the Canary Islands.
According to sources from the Government of the Canary Islands informed EFE, the investigation is declared secret, but it is an extension of the complaint that caused in May the closure of another center for 45 boys of the same association in Santa Brígida (Gran Canaria), Fortaleza I, for mistreatment of minors that may constitute crimes of injury, hatred, omission of the duty to prevent crimes, against moral integrity and threats.
The Canarian Police has arrested two people related to that association, in an operation that includes six entries and searches, two of them in reception centers in Arinaga and Firgas.
The sources have specified that the Ministry of Social Welfare of the Canarian Government, from which the complaint to the Prosecutor's Office that started the case months ago, has only received instructions for the moment to close one of them, the 'José García' of Arinaga, a resource with 148 minors to whom alternatives are already being sought.
Another of the police searches is being carried out at the headquarters of the Quórum Social 77 association in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, on Viera y Clavijo street.
When this operation was launched in May, the Minister of Social Welfare, Candelaria Delgado, detailed that her department had put in the hands of the Prosecutor's Office testimonies of children from the Fortaleza I center who recounted mistreatment and racist insults, as well as medical reports from the pediatricians who attended them.
Then, she said that she was not aware that those responsible for Quórum Social 77 were aware of what was happening in that resource in the municipality of Santa Brígida.
However, the operation may have taken a turn that now points directly at them. Neither the Canarian Police nor the Ministry of Social Welfare have made public the names of the detainees, but Canarias 7 publishes that it is the president of the association, Delia G., and its director of centers, Enrique Q.
Asked about this matter in La Palma, where he is at a meeting at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, the president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, recalled that the autonomous community has been warning for months that the number of minors it protects, about 5,500, exceeds it.
And he stressed that, "with so many minors and for so long" it is difficult for the controls to work.
"We had been warning for a long time that these circumstances could occur and we hope it is only this," added Clavijo, who has not hidden his "utmost concern", because the crimes investigated are of "great seriousness".
