The robbery took place on 5 January in the Cartagena district of La Palma, while the store owner was serving several customers who were making purchases prior to Three Kings’ Day.
A woman wearing a blonde wig was the decoy. She knocked on the shop door and, as it was opened, three hooded armed men forced their way in.
They pointed their guns at the owner and at the customers as they filled their rucksacks with over a million euros worth of jewellery. Their calling card was left in the form of a bullet that they fired into the wall of the premises. With such a haul, they didn’t care much about their high-end getaway car on fire in which they fled to Murcia.
That was the start of Operation ‘Joypalm-Kataros’ which was eventually able to break up and arrest members of a violent criminal gang in the Murcia, Alicante and Valencia. But before the nine members of the group were arrested (four men and five women, aged between 18 and 48), the Judicial Police investigation had to start from scratch.
One of the threads they had was the images from the security cameras of the jewellery store from which they identified a number of suspects who had visited the store in the days and weeks prior to the hold up.
While investigators continued their enquiries, on 30 May two hooded men armed with weapons entered a house in Bétera (Valencia). They threatened and violently beat up the owners robbing them of 40,000 euros and their high-end mobile phones.
They were also two other robberies that followed a similar trend at a home in Torrevieja as well as a jewellery shop in Orihuela Costa. In all of them, they hit their victims on the head with the butt of a gun as they forced them to open up their safes. All of the evidence led investigators to Portmán (La Unión) where the group had rented a house as they carried out their violent agenda.
“It was a perfectly organised gang, each member having his own task, either as a decoy, a driver, those who carried out the robberies, those who held the gun and those who frightened and attacked the victims to scare them into handing over the merchandise,” said Guardia Colonel Francisco Pulido.
The gang was finally ‘busted’ on June 20. The Civil Guard organized an operation aimed at arresting them en route, when they were traveling from Portman (Murcia) to Alicante. The operation resulted in the interception of two vehicles, in which three men and three women, all members of the criminal group, were traveling. Later, two further members of the group were also arrested.
Inside the vehicles, the Civil Guard found three firearms, detonating ammunition, a Taser pistol, large doses of marijuana and cocaine, falsified documentation, as well as jewellery and watches valued at around 63,000 euros, all of which, together with one of the high-end vehicles used in the journey, was seized.
At the beginning of this month of July, the last member of the gang was arrested in Murcia.
Thus, the ‘Joypal-Kataros’ operation, which is still ongoing, has so far resulted in nine arrests, made up of five women and four men, aged between 18 and 48, who are all now accused of the of the crimes of robbery with violence and intimidation, illegal possession of weapons, drug trafficking, falsification of public documents, theft of use of a motor vehicle and belonging to a criminal group.
