The subdelegate of the Government in A Coruña, María Rivas, visited today the facilities of the Santiago Civil Guard Headquarters where part of the material intervened in Operation Salvamorel is stored, in which 15 people, eleven men and four women were arrested for their alleged participation in at least forty robberies with force, subtracting material worth more than 700,000€ in Galicia. Arrests are expected in the next few hours.
María Rivas has congratulated all the personnel involved in both the investigation and the clarification of this operation and has once again highlighted the work carried out by the Security Forces and Corps on a daily basis.
This group of criminals began to be investigated in March by the ROCA team of the Civil Guard of Santiago de Compostela, responsible for the investigation, when it detected the presence of some of them in the vicinity of industrial ships where several robberies were subsequently committed.
The investigators verified that behind the commission of these events was a criminal network formed by a group with family ties and base in the town called O Carqueixo, located in the town of Lugo. Most of those investigated had an extensive criminal record with a history of robbery and even some of them with numerous search and arrest warrants.
A large number of civil guards from the A Coruña, Lugo and GRS (Rural Security Group) of Pontevedra, participated in this operation that allowed the arrest of the suspects and the recovery of numerous incriminating material from the robberies.
In the early morning of July 27, eight house searches were carried out simultaneously in various localities in the provinces of A Coruña and Lugo.
In Santiago and Betanzos two searches were carried out, in Melide (A Coruña) the agents entered two homes and in Lugo four other searches were carried out in homes and in the shanty town of O Carqueixo, where two shotguns allegedly stolen in A Coruña with the serial numbers deleted were intervened.
The detainees acted in a coordinated group, usually travelling in several vehicles to detect the presence of police patrols.
In order not to be identified, at the scene, they removed vehicles that they used both to access the place where they committed the robberies and to escape without fear of being identified.
When they were detected by police patrols, they did not hesitate to flee at high speed, endangering the safety of other drivers, for which reason they are also charged with various crimes against traffic safety.
On other occasions, when they were caught participating in the robberies with the vehicles they owned, they filed reports of robbery at the Civil Guard barracks pretending that they had stolen it, so they are also charged with several crimes of false reporting and crime simulation.
The band's preferred target was thefts in industrial warehouses and electrical stores, where they removed the coils of copper wire due to the very high price of this type of material on the market. The detainees prepared the copper for sale by removing the rubber and plastic from the cover, using two industrial cable stripping machines, which were located in the home registers.
The investigators removed trucks or vans that they used to transport the stolen material. On some occasions, they even simultaneously stole trucks to transport the heavy cable reels and passenger cars that they used as shuttles that allowed them to detect the police presence on the road before the vehicle carrying the stolen material passed through the place.
This was the method used by the detainees in a theft of copper coils, valued at more than 40,000 euros, perpetrated in a warehouse of electrical material in the municipality of Ordes (A Coruña). The detainees committed robberies throughout the autonomous community of Galicia, mainly in the provinces of A Coruña and Lugo.
They stole in ships and warehouses, in commercial establishments of machinery and tools, in quarries, in second homes located in isolated areas, in mechanical workshops, etc. In addition, they removed a significant number of vehicles that they used to commit thefts, mainly from a brand, a model in which they had specialized to violate the ignition security system.
The researchers intervened in the homes numerous effects from the thefts: televisions, machinery, tools, sound equipment, firearms, mock guns, tires, copper wire, etc. The intervened material is only a small sample of the large number of subtracted effects, since the researchers tried to get rid of most of the material in the hours following the subtraction. The robberies were committed at night, immediately transferring the effects to the shanty town of O Carqueixo in Lugo, where they hid it.
A few hours later, other members of the group were responsible for transporting and selling it hundreds of kilometers away, outside the province or even in other autonomous communities, using vans from rental companies to move them, which allowed them to make it difficult for the security forces and bodies to detect them.
The investigation has been carried out under the direction of Examining Court No. 2 in the town of Ordes (A Coruña). One of the detainees has been imprisoned and the rest of those investigated have been released with the obligation to report periodically to the court,
The deputy delegate of the Government has been accompanied by the Lieutenant Colonel of the Civil Guard Command, by the Captain of the Santiago company, José Antonio Rivero Zobra and by members of the Roca de Santiago team