Terminal 1 of Barcelona’s El Prat airport was this Friday a sway of uniformed policemen, plainclothes and thieves who tried to go unnoticed among the tumult of hundreds of travelers starting or ending their August holidays. The news released on Thursday by La Vanguardia of the multimillion-dollar theft of a suitcase and a bag with jewelry and watches in the Emirates company check-in area has caused in the last few hours a call effect from criminals who without thinking have moved to the aerodrome to try your luck
As it is. In just three hours, this newspaper witnessed two red-handed arrests by citizen security agents from the Mossos d’Esquadra at the airport. In the same space of time, the National Police transferred another arrested person. And so all morning.
The slogan of the airport police commanders was to expel them from the terminals. It was made with all the acquaintances, the regulars, those who have El Prat as their base of operations and try to rob carelessly without being seen. This is the tactic used on Wednesday afternoon by the two Kosovars who quietly and without being seen took away a Louis Vuitton cabin suitcase on which was an Hermès Birkin bag, both owned by a Russian tourist in her 70s who together with his daughter they returned to their country after a vacation.
La Vanguardia advanced the content of the notorious coup: jewelry and watches valued at eight and a half million euros, with a very special piece: a diamond ring set in white gold with a 47-carat central stone, valued at four and a half million euro.
The pull effect was evidenced because in addition to the regulars, the police began to discover “suspicious” characters loitering in the queues of travelers. Some of these suspects, in informal conversations with the agents, confessed to having gone to “try their luck” after the news of the million-dollar coup.
Precisely yesterday the famous ring arrived at the bunker of the Mossos police station at the airport. A piece that the thieves threw out the window of the rented car with which they intended to leave Spain, when they were stopped by a Trànsit patrol on the highway, near Salt.
One of the police officers previously observed how the co-pilot threw something out of the window. But the priority at that moment was to intercept the vehicle and they continued until they forced it to stop. When the detainees and the loot arrived at the Girona police station, they discovered that the 47-carat ring was missing. At that moment one of the mossos remembered the moment of the window.
Several patrol cars moved onto the highway and closed off an area. Given its size and the brilliance of the diamonds, it shouldn’t have been difficult, but it was starting to get dark. In that joint team that was organized between the Trànsit, Girona and airport mossos, it occurred to the latter to activate Tedax. The police specialists in defusing explosives moved with a metal detector. In two hours, the ring was located and the scientific police activated to collect it.
Yesterday, a couple of plainclothes policemen from the airport went to Girona to pick up the ring and since Thursday the alleged perpetrators of the robbery have been sleeping in the cells of the El Prat police station. Today they will go to court accused of a crime of theft. Nothing indicates that they are not released.
Another thing is yes, as it happens in other airports such as Madrid, the Prosecutor’s Office in El Prat requests a restraining order from the aerodrome that facilitates police work. In fact, one of the two detainees had a restraining order for one kilometer from the Adolfo Suárez terminals, in force since the end of the year.
Yesterday, there was a lot of attention at the Emirates counters. The photograph illustrating this information was also circulated among company personnel. It was incomprehensible to everyone, not only the mistake of the two women, but also the reason why they were flying on a regular flight of a commercial company and not on a private plane, with such hand luggage.
Neither of them showed excessive concern at the time of the complaint. The victims were already in full flight when the Mossos called them to notify them of the arrest of the thieves and the recovery of the jewels. They thought it was a joke. The woman said that as soon as the police authorized her, either she would return or she would send a person she trusted to collect her belongings.
Even the guys who irregularly laminate travelers’ luggage yesterday warned many tourists to be careful with their bags. “Caution, the thieves here are very good. They took eight million euros the other day”, a classic warned a Russian couple. They weren’t that good though. Of course, they were lucky, but they wasted it.
