Police in Spain say that they have dismantled a criminal organisation that was trafficking migrants from the Middle East to the United Kingdom and Ireland thanks to information from the Royal Gibraltar Police.

The Royal Gibraltar Police, along with HM Customs, is the primary civilian law enforcement agency in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar, which is located in the south of the Iberian Peninsula.

The Spanish National Police said that police in Gibraltar had “informed the [Spanish] National Police of the detection at the Gibraltar International Airport of a citizen who had accessed the land border with Spain and intended to travel to the United Kingdom with a forged passport”.

The footage shows two police officers in Spain taking one of the alleged members, unnamed, of the illegal migrant trafficking organisation, which found migrants to traffic on social media networks, into custody.

The migrants being trafficked to the United Kingdom were reportedly primarily from Iraq and Syria and the police said they had made five arrests in total, adding that “the two main people in charge of the organisation usually operated from Belgium and Germany”.

The Spanish National Police also said in a statement obtained by Newsflash along with images today (Friday, 25th March) that “the criminal organisation facilitated the irregular entry of Middle Eastern migrants into United Kingdom”, providing them with forged passports and plane tickets.

They added that they had “confirmed that the organisation also had the necessary capacity and collaborators to transfer migrants to Calais (France), where they embarked on a small boat to cross the English Channel to the United Kingdom.”

The police said that the criminal organisation provided migrants with fake plane tickets and other documents so that they could enter the United Kingdom after transiting through “several European countries”.

The Spanish authorities said that they believed that at least 30 migrants were trafficked into the UK by the criminal organisation, netting them an estimated “profit of over EUR 150,000” (GBP 125,000; USD 165,000).

The authorities said that officers had dismantled the criminal organisation in Torrelavega, which is an industrial city in the northern Spanish region of Cantabria, on the Bay of Biscay.

The organisation was “allegedly dedicated to facilitating the irregular entry into the United Kingdom of citizens from the Middle East using several European states, including Spain, as transit countries”.

They added that they had arrested two people, the alleged leaders of the organisation, who have not been named, as a result of the investigation.

The police also said: “The investigation began thanks to information obtained through police cooperation channels. The Royal Gibraltar Police informed the National Police of the detection at the Gibraltar International Airport of a citizen who had accessed the land border with Spain and intended to travel to the United Kingdom with a forged passport.

“After multiple steps and the analysis of a large amount of information provided by other European police forces within the framework of EUROPOL, the agents were able to verify the existence of this criminal organisation whose main activity was the introduction into the United Kingdom of migrants from the Middle East, mainly from Iraq and Syria.”

The criminal network was advertising services on social media and providing migrants “who contracted their services” with fake residence cards and passports, “generally from a European country”, as well as plane tickets allowing them “to travel to the United Kingdom or Ireland”.

The police added: “When the destination of the trip was the United Kingdom, the migrants, either during the flight or as soon as they landed, discarded the false identity documents and applied for international protection to the British authorities. However, if the destination was Ireland, they had to clandestinely cross the land border with the United Kingdom.”