Two people have been imprisoned as alleged leaders of a network that, in exchange for money, provided false documentation to unaccompanied immigrant minors for their transfer to the peninsula from the Canary Islands. In addition, seven other alleged members of the organization are on provisional release with the obligation to appear in court every fifteen days, all of them investigated for "crimes against the rights of foreigners for profit within a criminal organization and document forgery", according to the order of the head of the Court of Instruction number 4 of La Laguna.
This criminal organization, which has "a complex structure" and has been investigated for several months until the arrests were made last week, was dedicated to profiting by transferring minors under guardianship in centers of the islands from Tenerife, Gran Canaria and Lanzarote to the peninsula using documentation from third parties, according to the evidence.
Among the alleged involved are two people who acted as leaders, recruiters and "smugglers" of the minors, six who provided the passports and two who booked the flights, according to the court order.
According to the National Police, they charged the minors under guardianship or their families about 1,000 euros for taking them with someone else's documentation to Alicante, Málaga, Valencia and Barcelona.
The so-called "Akron operation" began in January of this year, when a manager of a minor center in Puerto de la Cruz (Tenerife) warned the Illegal Immigration Networks Unit (UCRIF) that there were people who contacted inmates to convince them that they could provide them with documentation from their countries of origin to leave the island and travel to the Iberian Peninsula.
On February 8, two minors disappeared from the Puerto de la Cruz center and the center manager confirmed to the Police that their identity cards were still there, so it was suspected that they intended to move to the peninsula with false documentation.
Subsequently, the two minors were admitted to a minor center in Valencia, and stated that they had flown from Tenerife to Málaga with documentation from other people.
Another minor who arrived from Lanzarote to the Valencian center stated that he had traveled in a similar way.
On March 6, two other minors disappeared from the Puerto de la Cruz center and were located the next day at the Tenerife Norte airport when they were trying to fly to Málaga with passports and boarding passes in the name of other people.
The escapes of minors from the minor center of Puerto de la Cruz continued and the next one was detected on March 24, although the boy, 16 years old and born in Morocco, was intercepted in Tenerife Norte when he was about to board to Barcelona with someone else's documentation.
Subsequent investigations made it possible to detect new escapes of minors from centers in the Canary Islands for several months, some of whom were intercepted at airports when they were trying to fly with passports provided by the organization.
The National Police has found out that the same documentation with which these minors were going to travel was used on various flights to the peninsula and originating from Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and Tenerife, sometimes with a time difference and with the minors always accompanied by a "smuggler".
