The machine was well oiled. A Serbo-Croatian criminal group suspected of hundreds of burglaries across Europe was dismantled last November during an operation led by a Franco-Spanish investigation team, with 25 arrests, announced this Saturday the French gendarmerie.
Between July 2021 and October 2022, the group scoured Europe, committing hundreds of burglaries in France, Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Austria for a damage of “several million” of euros, according to the gendarmerie.
The group, made up of around sixty people, was extremely well structured, with a “very integrated clan, family functioning”, ranging from teams perpetrating burglaries to receivers, passing through the laundering of the money thus collected, described to AFP General Marc de Tarlé, head of the Central Office for the Fight against Itinerant Delinquency (OCLDI). It was organized around a family leading teams of burglars made up in particular of children of the family and other siblings with strong pressure and firm obligations of result, detailed the gendarmerie in a press release.
Large-scale Franco-Spanish investigation
Initially, “summer 2021”, French investigators were working on “about twenty facts and a few individuals”, said the general. Then “significant surveillance work and numerous exchanges with Spain, Croatia in particular” made it possible to identify a Serbo-Croatian group. In September 2021, the JIRS (specialized interregional jurisdiction) of Bordeaux opens a judicial investigation and a Franco-Spanish investigation team is formed.
Faced with the international scale of the phenomenon, on September 19, 2022, a joint Franco-Spanish investigation team was created, under the aegis of Eurojust and with the support of Europol, to ensure better coordination on the day of the arrests that take place simultaneously in several countries.
It was done on November 22: 25 people, aged 20 to 40, were arrested in France, Spain, the Netherlands, Croatia and Italy. Among them, 17 individuals appear in the French file and 8 in the Spanish. During the searches, 550,000 euros in counterfeit notes, vehicles, weapons, jewelry and luxury items were seized. Of the 25 implicated, “23 were indicted by French or Spanish magistrates and imprisoned, and 2 are under house arrest in Italy and the Netherlands pending their surrender to the French authorities”, added the police station.