The criminal organisation dismantled yesterday in Operation ‘Safra Justa’ (Fair Harvest) will see eleven alleged participants, all of them police, undergo their first judicial interrogation at Lisbon’s central criminal court this afternoon.
“There are 10 GNR agents and one PSP agent”, writes tabloid Correio da Manhã today. “All closed their eyes to the trafficking of people – a scheme of illegal immigration installed in various locations of Beja and which supplied labour to agricultural explorations.
“Suspicions are that these police agents acted armed as a form of migrant prison guard. Victims were obliged to work from sunrise to sunset, and very often were beaten. They were not allowed to stop working, or have regular breaks. They slept in barns, shops and ruins – but they had to pay for the mattress given to them by the network: they did not have documents, and were treated like slaves, worse than many animals”.
The 11 police agents were detained by the PJ’s anti-terrorism unit in an operation that took over 300 inspectors to Beja and surrounding areas in the early hours of yesterday morning.
“In Cabeça Gorda, for example, the population was woken with a start by the commotion at the central café and an old illegal old people’s home, closed for years, but which had served as a hostel for many exploited migrants”, says the paper.
“Searches also took place at the GNR police station.
“The objective was to exercise 18 arrest warrants, of which 17 were realised. Only one of the suspects managed to escape: an Indian man, considered to be the ring-leader of the criminal enterprise.
“The migrants, who are the victims here, were all taken to Beja Air base”, adds the paper.
And this is the irony of the situation: many of them (potentially almost all of them) will now be heard “for future memory” and then expelled from Portugal, “because they are illegal”. They are in this country without documentation; how ever they came here, they cannot stay.
CM acknowledges that “many could flee and try their luck elsewhere, because they are not being detained and nothing obliges them to stay, nor to denounce the network that exploited them” and which maintains contacts in their home countries, and could potentially threaten family members living there.
Aside from the 11 police agents, six other people were arrested yesterday, aged between 26 and 60.
A statement by the PJ maintains that the criminal organisation “controlled around 500 foreign workers”, albeit not all of them will be considered ‘victims of trafficking’. Some will be legalised in this country, and not at risk of expulsion.
The alleged crimes under investigation date from 2023, says Lusa.
Judicial questioning begins today, from 2pm.
Sources: Correio da Manhã/ Lusa
