Spanish police detained five people suspected of smuggling migrants through Barcelona airport illegally. Two of the five had been running a restaurant in the airport for the last ten years, reported the Spanish press, including the daily newspaper El Periodico on Friday (October 13).

The five suspects, believe Spanish police, were part of an organized group. Two of the suspects arrested worked with the two who ran the restaurant and the fifth suspect worked on the maintenance staff in the airport.

Following the arrests, all five have been immediately dismissed from their work at the airport and have been forbidden from entering airport territory.

The group is believed to have used staff uniforms and passes to smuggle migrants out of the airport and avoid going through normal border controls.

'Large sums of money'

According to El Periodico, migrants are believed to have paid "large sums of money" to the group in order to avoid the checks and enter Spain and the rest of the Schengen free travel area, for which the migrants did not have the correct papers or visas.

It is believed most of the migrants came in on international flights through terminal one or were smuggled from the transit zone without passing border controls.

Also read: Europol dismantles smuggling ring in Spain

Is is believed that this way the migrants were able to pass through restricted zones, reserved only for employees. Some of them were given the uniforms normally used by cleaners at the airport. Thus they were able to enter Spanish territory, say the Spanish authorities.

According to El Periodico, the investigation into the group has been going on for months. Police first detained a worker in March. From this first arrest, investigators realized that the suspect was not just an isolated case, but the tip of an iceberg.

Transit zone

Many of the migrants smuggled are believed to have passed through Barcelona on the pretext of changing planes for somewhere else, like Turkey or Ireland. But in fact, they just wanted to enter Spain fraudulently, reports El Periodico.

According to InfoMigrants French, the smuggling group bought the migrants tickets to countries like Ireland deliberately so they would have to pass through the transit zone as Ireland is not part of Schengen. As they disembarked from one flight, the migrants were met by the group, given the uniforms to change in to and then allowed to exit the airport using the security badges, investigators believe.

Police admit that this strategy was "new to them" and could have led to "tens of migrants entering the country illegally and getting round the normal border checks."

Also read: Spanish police arrest suspected members of migrant smuggling network

Suspects charged 22 times

Prosecutors have charged the group with 22 different charges related to the smuggling and illegal migration, report the Spanish news portal El Caso.

The operation was carried out in conjunction with the border police.

At the end of 2022, Barcelona airport was also the site where a group of 27 passengers fled a plane after an unscheduled stop on a flight between Morocco and Turkey. At the time, a woman who was pregnant said that she was going into labor.

After the migrants fled, 13 migrants were initially recovered but 14 remained at large.

The flight was operated by the Turkish airline Pegasus and had 228 passengers on board, flying from Casablanca in Morocco to Turkey.

The woman was indeed pregnant but not in labor once in hospital. She was also arrested for disturbing the peace.

Of the 13 migrants who were stopped after fleeing, five of them continued their flight to Istanbul, and the other eight were flown out of Spain. It was not reported to which nationality the eight belonged.