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Sixteen arrests for two criminal groups: supposedly they facilitated the illegal entry and stay in Italy of non-EU citizens in an irregular situation.
On Wednesday, December 9, the Financiers of the Messina Provincial Command executed an order of precautionary custody against 16 people (5 of whom in prison and 11 under house arrest), who would be part of two criminal groups, based in Messina, accused to help clandestine immigration. They would have facilitated the irregular entry and stay in Italy of non-EU citizens in an irregular situation.
The investigations, carried out by specialists from the Organized Crime Investigation Group of the Economic-Financial Police Unit, were coordinated by the District Anti-Mafia Prosecutor’s Office headed by Maurizio de Lucia and concern citizens residing in Turin, Messina, Bergamo, Catania and Frankfurt am Main in Germany.. The investigation shed light on an illicit system aimed at the organization of false marriages between Italian and foreign citizens (Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians), with the aim of obtaining a residence card for family reasons, essential for entry and stay in the territory of the Italian State, or to cure the situation of migrants already expelled.
The investigation was born from the analysis of the statements made to some public officials by a series of Italian citizens. The Treasury has found, then, strange coincidences in some marriages between people of different nationalities. Same witnesses, same relationship between witnesses and spouses. Thus arose the suspicion that there was a criminal association organizing a fake wedding. The Fiamme Gialle have discovered two criminal organizations, long active in Messina and with ramifications in Morocco, headed by two Moroccan citizens. It was they who were in charge of organizing the false spouses’ trips to Morocco, assisting them during the handling of all the bureaucratic procedures: from the publications to the ritual, until the final phase when, once the purpose was achieved, the separation and divorce.
The two international “wedding planners”, however, did not operate alone, being able to count on a structured organization, articulated in several levels: the first, formed by trusted collaborators, all Moroccans, in charge of recruiting false spouses, of taking care of the compliance. the bureaucratic procedures related to marriage preparation and the subsequent steps required to obtain documentation for non-EU citizens. The gang had the help of two accomplices in Morocco who obtained the necessary documents for the celebration of marriages at the Consulate General of Italy in Casablanca.
From the wiretaps it appears that the suspects, over the phone, so as not to be understood, called the Italian women “sheep”. “There is a man who asked me if there are sheep … a man here in Messina, there is a friend of his who wants to come …”, they said. A second level was made up of wedding witnesses and interpreters; the third level, finally, was represented by a dense network of Italian subjects, mainly women, in disadvantaged conditions who got involved, first, for the wedding, then to recruit other migrants interested in false marriages. come out of the den… ”said a suspect to request acceptance of the fictitious marriage, addressing a woman who was showing signs of rethinking. Before reaching the signing of the contract, the organizers took all possible precautions to prove the false cohabitation of the newlyweds: hence the need to identify a house to be used as a conjugal home, in the world that both spouses moved there their home.
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