Police have arrested a nutritionist in Barcelona accused of monitoring his patients' bathroom habits with the help of a hidden camera.The suspect, identified by police as Jorge I. P., is accused of violating the privacy of his clients, who included the prominent Catalan politician Joan Puigcercos, top motorcyclist Jorge Lorenzo, and even the sister of former Barcelona soccer star Ronaldinho. The camera was found by a cleaner hidden behind a radiator in the toilet of his clinic. The device was connected by wire to his computer, which is being analyzed by police to determine whether he recorded any of the illicit footage.Jorge I. P. told officers after his arrest that he had installed the camera in an attempt to catch clients stealing from the clinic, a claim that prosecutors have rejected.If found guilty, the suspect could face between one to four years in prison.

Two men armed with handguns stole €40,000 euros in an attack on a McDonalds restaurant in Alfas del Pi (Alicante) during the early hours of yesterday morning. The attack occurred shortly before 2am as staff were getting ready to close up for the night. Nobody was injured as the two men fled as soon as the cash, which represented several days' takings, was handed over. They made their escape in a car driven by the third member of the gang. According to eye-witnesses, the two men who carried out the raid, seemed to be Spanish.

The body of a man whose identity has not been confirmed, was spotted floating next to a lorry tyre by the passengers of a pleasure yacht off Almería's Sabinal coast earlier today. A maritime salvage vessel, the 'Denébola', has been dispatched to the scene to recover the body, which is said to be dressed in a black suit

The Guardia Civil have found 875 kilos of hashish on a wooden launch on the Tuburón beach in San Roque close to Sotogrande. The drugs were hidden in a secret compartment and the boat was found complete with its outboard motor and some food in its interior. Officers took the boat from the Club de Playa area to Sotogrande port.

Bobby Spiers identified as a notorious member of the Manchester gangland, was arrested in Benidorm on Tuesday. Spiers, 40, was arrested by National Police on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder under a European arrest warrant and is being held in custody until a formal extradition can be carried out.The arrest follows extensive enquiries by Greater Manchester Police who were investigating a shooting in a pub in Salford in March 2006.Spiers is alleged to have been behind an attempted execution which led to the murder of two hit men.The gunmen were arrested but Spiers, from Prestwick, Greater Manchester, had been on the run since.Police began looking in Spain after several sightings were reported following a BBC1 Crimewatch programme that made an appeal in July last year for information on the whereabouts of Spiers.UK and Spanish police have been working in collaboration since these reports were received and have been searching for Spiers mainly on the Costa Blanca.

28 year old Uruguayan waiter, Santiago Victor D.S. known in the press as ‘Gordo’, has admitted that he killed the Italian tourist, Federica Squarise in the early hours of July 1 in Lloret de Mar. He told the court in Girona that he had consensual sex with the woman who then threatened to charge him with rape, and so he decided to kil her by putting clothes in her mouth and then suffocating her with his hands. The magistrate ordered jail with no bail. Under Spain’s penal code he faces between 15 and 20 years in prison for the murder, and between 6 and 12 years more for the sexual aggression.

Police are investigating what is an apparent killing following the discovery of the body of a woman on waste ground close to the CT 32 service road to the new industrial park at Los Camachos in Cartagena.The body, which showed signs of violence, is thought to have been there for some days, and had been partially covered with branches.The unidentified body has been described as robust, and was wearing a dark grey tracksuit with a green shirt and has now been taken to the Legal Medicine Institute in Cartagena.
An autopsy is to be carried out to try to determine cause of death.

Burnt bodies of two Spaniards have been found in a forest in Morocco. The Spaniards are both of Berber origin and were found close to the border with Melilla in a place called Mariguari, according to police sources. One of the two was identified by an ear-ring, but their identity has not yet been released by police. An autopsy is to be carried out, but it’s believed the two men in their 20’s went missing from their homes in Melilla last July 12.

Judicial Police of the Guardia Civil are investigating the death of a Danish man in Torrevieja, with the first data appearing to confirm a settling of criminal scores.
The body of the victim was found by his driver in his luxury villa in the Los Balcones urbanisation. The body showed signs of violence and seems to have struggled with his aggressor(s) before meeting his death. Police sources also say that the body was manipulated after death. The victim had rented the villa from German owners and had been in residence there for some 12 days.

An explosive device went off on a beach in Torremolinos in the early hours of this morning without causing any injuries.The small device went off at 20 minutes past midnight on the paseo marítimo in the La Carihuela district in the top tourist destination in Málaga province, between the Aloha Puerto and Timorsol hotels. The police, as yet, have not confirmed who they think may have placed the device, but it is almost certainly to be the work of Basque terrorists ETA. They have already claimed responsibility for four small and similar devices which exploded on the Cantabrian coast in the north of the country a week ago.

Freddie Thompson, leader of one of the feuding Drimnagh/Crumlin gangs, was alive or dead after rumours spread throughout Thompson's associates that he had been assassinated in Spain.Senior garda sources said last night there had been no reports from Spanish police of a murder. Thompson left Dublin last weekend for Spain amid reports of a growing threat to his life. He has been warned several times by gardai about threats to his life.The sources said that there was no evidence of a murder, or disappearance, but did confirm that Thompson's associates believe he is dead. Intelligence reached gardai early yesterday that Thompson's gang were unable to contact him and that it was completely out of character for him to lose contact with his gang.
Thompson, 27, was in Estepona in southern Spain in February when one of his close associates, Paddy Doyle, also 27, was shot dead. The murder has not been solved but Spanish police indicated to gardai that they suspected Doyle -- and Thompson -- had run foul of Turkish drug traffickers.Thompson was on the scene shortly after the murder, though it was not absolutely established if he was travelling in the car in which Doyle was shot, though Spanish police believe he was. A short time later Spanish police seized a car in a nearby car park and found 110kg of cocaine.
Thompson travels between Dublin, Amsterdam and the Costa del Sol. He was arrested in Rotterdam in October 2006 when police seized seven kilos of cocaine, six handguns and ammunition at an apartment he had been used. He evaded prosecution on a technicality when the case came to trial in February 2007.
Thompson is also an associate of Martin Foley, who has been the target of several murder attempts -- the latest in January when he survived being hit by five bullets.
The feud in which Thompson and Foley are caught up began in 2000 when a gang of young drug dealers from the Drimnagh-Crumlin area fell out after gardai seized cocaine in the Holiday Inn in Pearse Street. The gang split and the violence started with the murder of one of the gang in 2001. Since then there have been nine more murders, dozens of attempted murders and hundreds of violent incidents.
The intelligence reaching gardai about Thompson's disappearance come after an upsurge in activity from his enemies, who carried out at least one known assassination attempt early this month and were planning another murder last week.
The spread of Irish gangland violence to Spain is not new and six known Irish criminals have been murdered there in the past four years. In 2004, the leaders of the Westies gang, Stephen Sugg and Shane Coates, were murdered and buried in a secret grave in Alicante. John McKeown, 48, said to be a major figure in international drug trafficking, was shot dead in January last year in Torrevieja. Sean Dunne, 32, from Coolock, was shot dead in September 2005, also near Alicante. And, the body of Cork man Michael 'Danser' Ahern was found stuffed into a freezer in Albuifera, Portugal, in September 2005.
Gardai who know Thompson said last week that the murder in Spain of his friend Paddy Doyle had badly affected him and he had been acting in an erratic manner since.
Doyle was Thompson's main "enforcer" and had personally carried out the assassinations of two of Thompson's rivals. Doyle had been living in Spain since 2005.

A 26-year-old female suspected drug courier has been arrested by men of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) for alleged unlawful possession and attempt to export 1.050 kilogrammes of substances that tested positive for cocaine at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport (NAIA) Abuja.
Fourteen (14) of the wraps were discovered to have been stuffed into her private parts while 44 other wraps were ingested by her in a desperate bid to earn 1,000 Euros.Reacting to her arrest, the NDLEA Airport Commander Alhaji Hamza Umar cautioned drug traffickers to stop abusing their bodies. Hamza said that it is dehumanizing for anybody to either ingest or insert narcotic drugs.
“It is amazing the way drug couriers treat themselves with disdain. They must understand that this is sheer cruelty and it has to stop,” the Commander warned.
The suspect, arrested on July 3rd works in Spain as a cleaner. The suspect who hails from Asaba in Delta State is the only female among eight suspected drug traffickers so far arrested at the Abuja airport in July 2008.

National police have arrested four people who are accused of trafficking in cocaine in the Campo de Gibraltar area. The four are to face charges of committing a crime against public health, and some 3.2 kilos of the drug was recovered in the operation. The four acted in particular during the local fiestas in municipalities in the region.In a separate incident the Civil Guard has arrested a Spanish married couple at the port in Ceuta as they were boarding a ferry for Algeciras. The couple was carrying 25 inflated balloons which they said were for a children’s party, but inside which the police found more than six kilos of hashish.

Gardai and Revenue’s Customs service arrested two men last night following the seizure of cannabis with a potential street value of €1.1 million at a warehouse in an industrial estate in Blanchardstown.The cannabis was discovered in pallets of tiles which had been imported from Southern Spain. The men, aged 39 and 53, were arrested at the scene and are currently being held at Blanchardstown Garda Station under Section 2 of the Criminal Justice ( Drug Trafficking ) Act 1996. They can be detained for up to 7 days.

Police in Spain said Wednesday they had seized 4.2 tonnes of hashish in the south of the country and arrested nine suspected drug traffickers. The drugs were found in April on two speedboats, one carrying 2.4 tonnes of hashish and the other 1.8 tonnes, police said in a statement. Police also seized 1.2 million euros (1.9 million US dollars), four vehicles as well as several guns and documents during 18 searches carried out as part of their probe of the group which is suspected of smuggling hashish from Morocco. They did not give an estimated street value for the drugs. Morocco is believed to be one of the world's largest producers of hashish. It has vowed to crack down on trafficking and toughened border controls in recent years. Spain, with its extensive coastline, is Europe's main entry point for Moroccan hashish and cocaine from South America, mostly from its former colony Colombia, the world's top producer of the drug.

The body of a man has been found in the burnt out remains of an A4 car on the A-92 road near Gérgal in Almería. The body was on the back seat of the vehicle. Police were alerted at 4am on Friday morning by a driver who had noticed the fire on land next to the road, and then a second driver said that there was a car on fire in the area. The Guardia Civil have now opened a full investigation.
Back in 2005 two people were found at the same spot, in a burnt out vehicle with German registration. Then a settling of scores among foreigners was considered to be the cause.

officers have arrested a man of French nationality who was under suspicion of being involved in what was known to the investigating authorities as ‘Operation Envolat’.
The man in question was arrested aboard his yacht, which was flying the French flag, just off the coast of the island of Cabrera. According to Guardia Civil sources, the Frenchman often sailed through these particular waters of the Mediterranean Sea but changed the yacht’s name and flag every so often in order to avoid detection by the authorities.This operation has been ongoing for the last few months and was made more difficult by the fact that enquiries revealed that a luxury yacht was being used to transport the drugs. It was only very recently, due to certain controls carried out, that the yacht in question was regarded as suspicious and boarded. Security forces which form part of the Guardia Civil discovered 66 packets of hashish, amounting to two tonnes in total.

Investigators suspect that and elderly German couple found stabbed to death at a flat in Moraira town centre shortly after midnight last night may have been killed by burglars. A large kitchen knife was left at the scene and the doors to the couples' safe were found open, and it was empty. The identities of the couple have not been confirmed though it is known that the man was aged 78, and his wife 85.

27 year old Rumanian immigrant was arrested last Sunday evening hours after a woman returned home to find him asleep in her chalet. The woman noticed something was wrong when she noticed that the door of the property had been forced and that one of the window bars had been bent out of shape.
Peering in through the bedroom window, she spotted the man asleep in her bedroom, and immediately called the police. He was captured a few hours later hiding in bushes on the banks of the Guadalmedina river between Casabermeja and Málaga.
During the search, a shotgun wrapped in a blanket was found discarded close to the chalet, which is located in the El Chorro area, not far from the Hermitage of Nuestra Señora del Socorro, on the outskirts of Casabermeja.

Police are investigating the death of a man whose badly burned body was found shortly after midnight last night in a wooded area of the Garraf natural park near Sitges (Barcelona). It seems that the man was hit over the head before being doused in some kind of inflammable liquid then set alight. The body was discovered after fire-fighters had been called in to extinguish the resulting bush fire.

One of the two security guards shot in a raid this morning in Viso del Alcor has died at the Virgen del Rocío Hospital in Sevilla. The 48 year old man died of abdominal injuries before doctors could operate.The other guard was shot five times - in the arm, leg and lower abdomen - and was taken to Valme Hospital, where his condition is described as serious, but not life-threatening. They were shot at around 11am by a man on a motorcycle as they were carrying bags of cash into a branch of the Banco Santander on the calle Real in Viso del Alcor. Their attacker sped off with the cash and remains at large.

A year-long police operation has led to a major drugs’ bust in El Médano when three people of different nationalities were remanded in custody after being arrested when a boat believed to have sailed from Morocco was seized.
Properties were also searched and some 3,000 euros was confiscated, together with a number of items which police believe were being used in association with the drug trafficking. They included night vision binoculars, GPS equipment, mobile phones and cans of gasoline for the return journey back to Morocco.

Two Colombians (aged 34 and 43) and an Italian (45) were arrested yesterday after a suitcase containing 120,000 ecstasy tablets was found in the back of their car.
The three suspects were arrested as the Italian man, unaware that he had been tailed, was handing over the vehicle to the Colombian pair close to where the Summercase music festival is being staged this weekend in Boadilla del Monte (Madrid).
With each tablet fetching between €8-€15, the total market value of the haul is estimated at over a million euros. It seems that the drugs were bought in Holland and transported by the Italian man to Spain by car. The importance of the haul becomes apparent given that, up until the end of last month, only 162,500 ecstasy tablets were seized across the whole of Spain, and that the total for last year was 481,600. Ecstasy, or MDMA, is an illegal, synthetic, psychoactive drug which produces a euphoric sensation of intimacy with others as well as diminished feelings of fear and anxiety, but can be fatal.

A briton has been jailed for 15 years in Spain after police infiltrated a £126m cocaine smuggling operation. Timothy O'Toole, 53, who has Manchester connections, acquired the Atlantic Warden fishing boat to run drugs from Latin America to Europe - not realising the skipper was an undercover Customs officer. The vessel was boarded by police off the west coast of Africa after a three-year operation.
James Carabini, 45, from Dublin, was acquitted.Trafficker Timothy Kieran O'Toole (53), gave his address as Limerick but was using a British passport when he was arrested in May 2005. O'Toole is also thought to have connections with Manchester. He is not known here to any of the garda national units or to senior garda officers in Limerick. However, Dubliner James Carabini (45) was cleared of the charges by the three-judge national criminal court in Madrid. Father-of-two Carabini, of Carnlough Road, Cabra, moved to Spain after he came to the attention of the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB). As a result of a Cab investigation into his actions, Mr Carabini's social welfare payments were stopped and he and a friend had to hand over cash from an alleged overpayment. The Madrid court heard how an undercover international police operation, which had lasted three years, ended with the seizure of 3.5 metric tonnes of cocaine when a yacht was boarded off the Cape Verde Islands off Africa's west coast. O'Toole had supplied the Atlantic Warden boat for the cocaine run from Latin America after meetings with known drug dealers in Britain, Germany, Holland, Portugal and Spain. Those meetings were monitored by undercover police and customs officers from Britain, Spain and elsewhere. The court was told that O'Toole was believed to have been involved regularly in making contacts between South American cocaine barons and organised criminals in Europe. The haul on board the Atlantic Warden was headed for Galicia, on the northwest tip of Spain, from where it would have been distributed to the UK and other countries in northern Europe, the court heard. Several officers from British Customs and police forces in the UK were involved in Operation Warden which first began in 2003 when O'Toole attended a meeting in Hamburg, Germany, at which the acquisition of a yacht was discussed.
Other meetings took place in Marbella on the Costa del Sol; Faro on the Portuguese Algarve; in Holland; and in Britain including at Southampton, where the Atlantic Warden was berthed for a time. Also on trial were three Spaniards and one of them was acquitted of the charges along with Mr Carabini.
Convicted with O'Toole were Daniel Baulo Carballo (44) -- who was jailed for 17 years and six months as the leader of the attempt to bring the cocaine aboard the yacht to Spain -- and Gonzalo Ferreiro Soto, who was given a prison sentence of 13 years, six months and a day. All claimed they were victims of a police sting operation, which is not permitted under Spanish law. But the judges ruled that O'Toole and the two others had not been persuaded to commit the crime by the police, but had instigated the smuggling attempt themselves. What they had not realised was that undercover police and customs officers were monitoring their movements.

Alicante police have arrested two 29 year old Spanish men, S.S.G. and F.B.H. on charges of computer fraud. The two sent spam and used other people’s bank accounts to bet in online casinos in a fraud which allegedly amounted to 280,000 €. Plane tickets and hotel reservations were also obtained by the pair often using the fraud techniques known as phishing and identity theft.
Police say they found the bank details of thousands of people from all over the world on their computer.

A patera small boat containing 875 kilos of hashish in a false bottom has been recovered by the authorities on the Tiburón beach in San Roque, Cádiz.
The drug came to light as the five metre boat broke up as it was being removed from the water by members of the local beach club. The drug was found in a false bottom and sides of the vessel.

Fifteen Russian sailors arrested in Spain for alleged drug trafficking have been allowed to see their relatives. They were detained two months ago, along with other foreigners in the port of Huelva on the Atlantic coast.
The crew maintains it undertook the extra work of unloading cargo from an unknown vessel while their ship was under repair. Spanish police say they were caught unloading a cargo load which contained four tonnes of hashish.

Tribunal de Cuentas, has revealed that Marbella was suffering a financial Black hole of 355 million € at the end of 2006. That amounts to 2,699 € per resident of the town, and the court has found as many as 13 financial and economic irregularities.
A new report from the court notes that a large part of the building agreements with the Town Hall included a clause which conditioned the approval of the building to the approval of the PGOU Urban Plan, and that large amounts of monies were diverted to third parties.

The Provincial Court in the city heard that the man had carried out high risk investment operations in the name of dead people, and had changed currencies without clients knowledge, with none of the movements being reflected in the branch’s official accounting. He also set up three companies in Gibraltar which he used to channel his investments and to avoid detection by Hacienda. The fraud occurred between the years 1988 and 1997.The man was also fined 10,800 € and ordered to compensate several clients to the total of nearly 260,000 €.
The owner of a financial advice firm was also found guilty of collaborating with the bank manager who has not been named in reports.

A man in his forties was stabbed in Malaga’s Plaza de la Merced late on Sunday. Police said that someone had snatched the Spanish flag he was waving and, as he tried to retrieve it, the victim received a wound to his right thigh. It was the most serious incident of the night as thousands of fans filled the city centre to celebrate Spain’s Euro2008 win.

Guardia Civil officers in Nerja confiscated 2.6 tons of hashish resin on the town’s Playazo beach last Friday. A resident of Puerto de la Torre was arrested during the operation. Also confiscated was a seven foot launch equipped with three 200 h.p. motors.

Romanian woman has been robbed of 1,500 euros while waiting at Málaga bus station. Investigators said she was approached by three well-dressed men, claiming to be police officers and showing false identification, who insisted on searching her luggage for drugs. When they finished and left, she discovered the theft of her savings by thieves who, witnesses claim, were also Romanian.

highly-organised gang who specialised in night-time burglaries while their victims were sleeping in their beds have been arrested.The Eastern European delinquents were based in a residential complex in Orihuela Costa.
They are known to have committed at least 20 break-ins in the provinces of Alicante, Murcia and Málaga.
The thieves used cars stolen in previous burglaries to carry out future assaults.
A special organised crime squad from the National Police had been tracking the gang since November, 2006 but the criminals, originally from Albania, got wind of the investigation and evacuated their Orihuela Costa home, escaping to Torrequebrada in Málaga.However the officers were able to follow and arrest four members of the gang.
Two of the men from Albania are suspected of carrying out the burglaries and two Spaniards are accused of giving them logistical help and fencing stolen property.
Police suspect there are other members of the gang at large who have not yet been identified.Officers discovered that the burglars had been sending large sums of money to Albania along with other stolen goods by post.
They also found an underground bunker used by the thieves to hide the booty they stole during the break-ins.Following the arrests officers raided two properties in Torrevieja and another in Torrequebrada, seizing a hoard of jewellery, eight designer watches, two televisions, cameras and other objects.

Police have found 5,000 kilos of hashish in an as yet un-named industrial estate in San Vicente del Raspeig. It’s thought a warehouse there was being used to store the drug ahead of its distribution in the U.K where it would have a market value of about 6.5 million €.Three arrests, two Britons and a Romanian, have been made in the operation so far, and more have not been ruled out in what is the second most important drugs haul in the province this year.
The nearly 5,000 kilos was recovered on Saturday night and those arrested were held on Saturday night in the cells of the main police station in Alicante.
Yesterday morning police statements were taken, and today the three will declare before the judge who will decide between prison on remand or bail.

Six people, including a two year old child, were injured, two of them seriously when a pedestrian bridge collapsed over both carriageways of the A7 motorway at the 198 km point in Mijas Costa. The accident happened at 4,55 pm when the busy traffic below hit the fallen bridge. The two seriously hurt are two men who were trapped in their crushed car by the fallen bridge, a 47 year old who was driving the vehicle and a 30 year old who was a passenger. The four others to be injured were a family travelling in the car behind. All the injured were taken to the Costa del Sol hospital in Marbella.Witnesses say that a crane got hooked onto the bridge, causing it to collapse. There were no pedestrians on the bridge at the time.

23 year old Aidan Holly, had just completed his army training, and was from the small village of Tarbert in North Kerry, and was in the Navarra town for the famous San Fermines festivities which got underway at the weekend.confirmed that a man who fell 30 metres to his death from the ancient city walls in Pamplona on Sunday was Irish.It’s reported that his body lay dead for some hours before being found.

Manuel Millón, the Jefe de Gabinete, the secretary for PP mayor of Nerja, has been found shot dead below the viewpoint, Balcon de Europa. Reports speak of one bullet wound in the forehead. The Civil Guard was called to the scene at the Balcón just after 7am, and their first hypothesis is that is a possible suicide.
The zone was closed off and access to the Balcon de Europa Hotel was blocked for a time.Witnesses say that Manuel Millón was seen walking down Calle Pintada to the Balcón with his head streaming blood. He appears to have shot himself in the Partido Popular headquarters in that street and then walked down to the Balcón de Europa where he threw himself down a 20 metre drop.The 54 year old was a teacher at a college in nearby Torrox, and have been in Nerja Town Hall for more than ten years. He was married with two children. Locals describe him as a well known and well educated man who had done a great deal for Nerja.

body found in Lloret de Mar has been confirmed to be that of the missing Italian tourist, 23 year old Federica Squarise, who went missing in the town on July 1.
The body was found half-buried and covered with branches.
Mossos d’Esquadra chief, Jordi Bascompte, told the press that it was thought the body had been dead for three or four days, but they had not been able to confirm if death took place where the body was found, in an area of the Caso Zaragoza, just a few metres from the Hollywood disctotec.
The young Italian had only arrived in Spain with a friend the previous Sunday.

An alligator is swapping life in Galashiels for the Costa Del Sol after the reptile was seized in the town.The alligator was found with a Western Diamondback rattlesnake during a raid by SSPCA officers, and will move to a the Crocodile Park in Torremolinos.It is alleged they were both being kept without a licence required under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976

The Khan family went sailing off the coast of Morocco and stumbled across suitcases loaded with cannabis. The British family dolphin-spotting in the Mediterranean came across suitcases containing £500,000 worth of cannabis.Simon Khan, from Witney, Oxfordshire, his partner and their two young sons risked their lives to seize the haul and hand it over to police after spotting the floating cases.They were on holiday in Duquesa, Spain, when they decided to take the boat trip and were 12 miles off Morocco when they saw the first case.Despite being worried the package was awaiting pick-up, sales manager Mr Khan said his family felt 'morally obliged' to seize it and report it to the Costa del Sol police. On their return they collected another five packages.Mr Khan said: 'The captain was terrified and I was worried. The whole way back there were boats criss-crossing backwards and forwards.'
Police took charge of the drugs but did not take the family's names or ask for statements. Mr Khan said: 'I was stunned by the lack of authority involved.'

42 year old Briton, named as Peter C. has been arrested in Marbella in connection with 14 counts of sexual aggression against minors carried out in the U.K.
The five victims of the man were aged between 11 and 17, and one of them was his own daughter, with three others some of her friends. He is accused of inappropriate sexual behaviour, and aggression with penetration and rape with the crimes dating back originally to 1989 and 1990, and then later between 2004 and 2006.
The arrest was carried out on a European Arrest Warrant issued by Guildford Magistrates Court last May, and the man faces a possible 10 to 14 years in prison. It comes thanks to the increased cooperation between the Spanish police and the Serious Organised Crime Agency SOCA in the U.K.

On Thursday, in the Sagres area, the Judicial Police (PJ) seized 199 bales of hashish, weighing around 6,000 kilos. The drug was being transported by fishing boat, and the four members of its crew were detained. The PJ released a statement saying that the police operation, dubbed “Relampago” (Lightning), was conducted with the support of the Portuguese Navy and Air Force. According to the PJ, the trawler’s movements had been under investigation and when it left its base port, Vila Real de Santo Antonio, last week, the fishing boat’s two-day trip to the Moroccan coast was kept under close surveillance by a Navy corvette and an Air Force aircraft.
The 13-metre long trawler was intercepted near the Algarve coast when its crew members were getting ready to offload the hashish. According to the police, some of those arrested already had convictions for drug trafficking offences.
On Sunday, the PJ confiscated another 2.5 tonnes of hashish in Faro. Officers said that the investigation had begun three months earlier. Some 75 bales of hashish were seized at Estudantes Beach, near Faro’s commercial harbour. This time, police apprehended six suspects, a Portuguese man and five Moroccans, aged between the 45 and 49. “Although the alleged drug traffickers offered no resistance to the arrest, they did try to escape, but without success,” said Faro PJ chief Guilhermino da Encarnaçao.He added that the drugs had been transported from North Africa in a fishing trawler and offloaded off the Algarve coast by two speedboats, which were also seized. The PJ chief stated that when police intercepted the smugglers, the hashish had already been transferred to a minivan with fake Spanish licence plates, so they believe the drugs were destined for the Spanish market.
The third seizure occurred on Saturday as a result of a joint operation between the Portuguese and Spanish authorities. Another 1,000 kilos of hashish were discovered in the Guadiana River when police spotted three crew members on a fishing boat attempting to discharge their illegal cargo on the Spanish side of the river. A Moroccan man was detained but two others managed to escape.
As well as being a main tourist region, the Algarve is also an entry point to Europe for drugs. The authorities are doubling their efforts to clamp down, and the PJ chief said: “It is an continuous battle. We are trying to control it as much as possible.”

Two men robbed a young Swedish woman as she left a bank in Fuengirola and stole 2,500 euros from her, which she had just withdrawn. The mugging took place last Wednesday at approximately 2 p.m. on Calle Iglesia, and police believe that the two thieves followed the victim from the bank and jumped her just 100 metres from the building. The money they got away with had been sent to the woman by her family in Sweden to help out with living costs. Police are investigating the case.

Provincial Court in Málaga has sentenced a man to seven years in prison for stabbing another man in the chest and face after he refused to invite him for a drink.
It happened last April in the La Nogalera area of Torremolinos when the man, accompanied by a girlfriend, approached the victim who was reported to be drunk at the time, asking him to buy them a drink. The sentence notes the aggressor is a drug addict. He now has to compensate the victim with a total 67,500 €. His girlfriend was released without charges.

Valencia policeman is accused of robbing 20 kilos of cocaine recovered by the police so that he could keep both his wife and his lover in the habit of taking the drug.The prosecutor in the case has charged two policemen with the theft of the drug which formed part of a 500 kilo haul found by the authorities in Valencia port. The second policeman says that he was not involved and has been implicate by his colleague ‘in revenge for a personal problem’.The policeman who has confessed said that he was in a ‘delicate situation’ and needed money to keep his wife and girlfriend happy. That was why he said he went along with the idea of the fellow officer to take the 20 kilos of the drug which had been left on a temporary basis in a police van. He said he sold three kilos of the drug to a club doorman before he and the other policeman were arrested.Had the accused sold all the drug they could have obtained as much as 600,000 €. One in five Europeans who take cocaine on a regular basis lives in Spain.

Tax officials and the Guardia Civil in Algeciras have seized 178 kilos of cocaine that was found in a container that officially held dried beans. The cargo was en-route from Callao in Peru to Valencia. Officers decided to search the container that had been deposited in the customs zone awaiting clearance. The cocaine was hidden in five sports bags underneath the bean cargo.

Serious and Organised Crime Unit, working with the Guardia Civil, have uncovered more than 30 caravans stolen in the UK on Spanish campsites.
British authorities were aware there were stolen caravans being sold to unsuspecting Britons, but the full scale of the organised crime operation was not uncovered until last week.Undercover police and a UK insurance investigator raided a number of campsites in Benidorm and their findings have been astonishing to say the least.
After checking the registration numbers of 120 caravans last week, they found that 30 of them had been reported as stolen in the UK.
Investigators have estimated the total value of the stolen caravans at one million euros. In the UK 700 caravans are stolen each year, many of which are filtered to the Costas by organised gangs.Checks revealed that none of the 30 stolen caravans had the correct legal paperwork or a receipt of payment.Police have been busy taking statements all week from the owners affected by the crime, all of whom are British expats.

The Civil Guard in Ciudad Real have arrested a total of 31 people, including one of their own, in an operation against drug trafficking which resulted in the recovery of 13 kilos of cocaine.The arrested Civil Guard is thought to have supplied information to the drug traffickers in the case which came to light when controls on drug trafficking near schools and colleges were stepped up.The arrests were made in two separate operations carried out in the towns of Almadén and Villanueva de los Infantes. One group purchased the drug in Madrid, while the second group, controlled by Colombians, imported the drug via Barajas airport in Madrid. The Civil Guard uncovered several points of sale in the Ciudad Real area. More arrests have not been ruled out as investigations continue.