Cheap UK crime wave holiday trips for European criminal gangs

The rise of the jet set gangs.

European criminal gangs are using budget airlines to jet into the UK and commit weeks of “volume crimes” before returning home to avoid arrest, The Sunday Post can reveal.

Bosses at Europol, the EU’s crime-fighting agency, said the tactic was favoured by a new generation of mobile organised crime groups operating across Europe.

Europol’s chief of staff, Brian Donald, said crime lords handed crooks a flight ticket with the simple instruction to carry out as many crimes, such as house break-ins or pick-pocketing, as they could over a short period, before they returned home and were moved on to another country.

In an exclusive interview at the agency’s base in The Hague, Aberdeen-born Donald told The Sunday Post that cyber-crime, people smuggling and terrorism were the fastest growing challenges facing Europol’s 900-strong army of intelligence analysts and police liaison officers.

But organising a pan-European response to the scourge of organised crime remains the mainstay of the agency’s work.

He explained: “We have seen this phenomenon of mobile organised crime groups who are nationals of one country but operate across multiple countries.

“They just do volume crime they steal wallets, cars, break into houses, you name it and then they are plucked out of the area they’re in and sent home, before they are shipped out to another country.

“There is whole infrastructure behind them that takes the stolen property and moves it on so they are free to fly in and out and just do the crime.

“So you have a crime wave in one area, it lasts two weeks and then it’s gone.

“If the team that are doing it are from six or seven countries away from say the village you are in, what chance does the village cop have on his own?

“That is where we come in.”

Donald explained how Europol helps join the dots in complex international investigations.

“Most of our business is drugs and we recently had a case where the Slovaks had a team who they knew were going to import cocaine and it was going to come in from Spain on a boat but they had no more than that.

“Then you had the Lithuanians who knew they had a team who had left the country but had no real idea what they were going to do.

“And then you had the Spanish who had intelligence which said the people who usually receive drug loads were getting busy.

“But crucially the Brits had the name of the boat and intelligence that four Lithuanians were learning to sail yachts.

“We coordinated all of that here at the Europol offices, round the table and you just can’t do that without an agency like ours.”

The 55-year-old started his police career in 1978 when his job was directing traffic in the Aberdeenshire village of Ellon.

But he rose through the ranks of the now defunct Grampian Police, where he was involved in dealing with the Peterhead Prison riots and the aftermath of the Piper Alpha disaster.

Donald then took on a string of national UK policing posts before joining Europol in 2007.

As well as drugs, the issue of illegal firearms is one which has dominated his time at Europol.

He explained: “It is a reoccurring theme in the conversations I have with police chiefs across Europe that organised crime gangs, and terrorists, have access to military grade hardware.

“Charlie Hebdo, Tunisia, the foiled plot in Verviers in Belguim there have been so many recent examples of military grade hardware, automatic weapons, assault weapons being used.

“I would highlight Charlie Hebdo in particular because all the evidence suggests, and I have not seen anything from a Europol perspective that contradicts this, the weapons were bought on the illicit market.

“This was not a great terrorist conspiracy. If you think back to the days of the IRA and the boat allegedly coming from Libya with weapons, it is not as sophisticated as that.

“It is a guy getting on a train to Brussels where he meets a guy and buys a gun. It makes it so much harder to police.”

Donald says cyber-crime is a huge issue but police forces are often tackling the issue with “one hand tied behind their backs”.

He says this is because the powers over “lawless” parts of the internet do not match what officers can do on the street.

He explained: “The world has changed so much, you no longer need to wait on a street corner for some guy to come along and buy your smack, you just go on the dark web and order it and it comes in vacuum pack bags which are difficult to trace by sniffer dogs.”

He continued: “Another issue is the situation in the Mediterranean with human trafficking.

“How do you deal with that because the organisers are not sitting in Sicily or mud huts in Africa, the guys making the money are sitting in London, Paris or Milan in very nice apartments making phone calls and buying boats.

“It needs a pan-European response.”

£5bn cost of criminals from Europe

European gangs have been blamed for carrying out crime sprees targeting high-value cars and housebreaking in well-to-do areas.

Last month Police Scotland Chief Constable Sir Stephen House also admitted tracking the perpetrators down was difficult as they were often young and their identities not always clear.

He added: “It’s not that we are not making arrests. Often we know who is doing it, and they will continue to do it if they are still out on the streets.

“There are issues with foreign nationals who may exit the country for a few months while it gets a bit hot and then come back later on.”

Ground breaking research carried out in Italy estimates 50 foreign mafia gangs are operating in Scotland, generating £5 billion from their illegal activities.

Their rackets include drugs, prostitution, extortion and apparently legitimate business sectors including property and wholesale supply.

The Joint Research Centre on Transnational Crime based in Milan highlighted crime syndicates in Italy, eastern Europe and Russia as posing the biggest threat and estimated Europe’s criminal trade to be worth £33 billion.

In the highest profile Scots mafia case, the Naples-based Camorra were revealed in 2008 as having infiltrated Aberdeen’s booming oil and gas industry.

Last month is also emerged detectives from Eastern Europe had been drafted in to work alongside Scottish police to target foreign criminals operating in Scotland.

Officers from Romania

and Lithuania were used to check international car numberplates on busy roads to see if any of the vehicles had been involved in crime else where in Europe.

Meanwhile in it’s first year Operation Nexus was responsible for catching and deporting 100 foreign criminals from Scotland, including drug dealers and

sex criminals.