Europol calls for citizen collaboration to stop the worst sex offenders in the EU

Anyone can be a victim of sexual abuse, and in the EU one of these violent attacks is reported every two minutes, according to Europol, the European Police Office.

The victims are mostly women and children, and the search for criminals is difficult because they can change their address frequently or travel from one country to another, but also hide in any neighborhood as an anonymous neighbor.

The support of the public is essential to stop them, and Europol has published their names and histories on its website.

Opened this Tuesday, the page received 120,000 visits in its first hours, a success of consultations that police experts hope to see translated into arrests.

"If you recognize one of the sexual assailants, you can send us information anonymously and contribute to a safer Europe," reads the campaign.

The list of 18 sex offenders will remain open for four weeks.

His photographs will also circulate on social networks.

Once inside the Europol page, the first 18 images, outlined in red, are those of these criminals.

There is, for example, Mohammed Herzi, a Tunisian national, wanted for multiple rapes, kidnapping and human trafficking.

Or Antonio Vladimir Vinueza Morales, Ecuadorian and persecuted for the rape of his daughter when the girl was 10 years old;

Nesat Bego, from Albania, who assaulted a boy under the age of 11 in Luxembourg;

the Russian Yuliy Sericov, a consumer of child pornography who had 5,701 documents of this kind on his computer;

Danish Frank Sayed Mohamed Sadegh Heskaer, who sexually abused minors;

Luciano Scibilia, an Italian, who abused at least five girls by giving them supposedly therapeutic massages, or the Bulgarian Plamen Ivanov Mitrev, who kidnapped and raped four women.

All are in a state of rebellion, and the list of their names has been drawn up by each of the 19 countries that are looking for them, including Spain, France, Poland, Romania, Latvia, Bulgaria or the Netherlands, and then sent to Europol.

“A European arrest warrant weighs on them, and that is why the citizen response is so important.

We have started

campaigns

with various crimes since 2016, and of the 91 criminals arrested since then, 33 were thanks to information provided by people on the Internet, ”says Claire Georges, Europol spokesperson, in a telephone conversation.

The police office was launched with a campaign that recreated an advent calendar with the most wanted criminals, and opened a window daily with the data of the subject in question.

“We continue in 2017 with a series that simulated holiday postcards and the same idea, that the wanted person could be recognized.

In 2018 we devised some letters as if they were from the Soccer World Cup, with the data of the criminals.

The one of the most wanted women in Europe arrived in 2019 under the slogan 'crime has no gender', and they have all been very well received by the public, "he adds.

As the page of the 18 sexual predators includes, below and on a white background, photos of other fugitives with different criminal histories, the Europol spokeswoman stresses that citizens can also call them if they identify them.

"Our goal is to arrest as many criminals as possible," he explains.

The information collected will go directly to the investigators in each of the countries looking for the escapee.

"By the time you have finished reading this, it is most likely that at least one violent sexual crime has already been reported somewhere in the European Union," says the campaign in its farewell.