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Paco Van Damme was actually a French fugitive

2023-01-02T14:52:22.484Z


The Civil Guard detains in Marbella a fugitive who had escaped from France on a prison permit and then from Portugal due to a police mistake, after laundering money from drug trafficking


Among fruits and organic products from a supermarket in Marbella (Málaga, 147,958 inhabitants).

It is the place where the Civil Guard arrested Edouard Fernando Pinto da Costa, a French fugitive of Portuguese origin in December who is facing a ten-year sentence for money laundering from drug trafficking.

He is 36 years old and he had lost track of him twice.

First in France, where in 2019 he disappeared during a prison leave.

Later, in 2021, after being arrested in Faro, in the south of Portugal, when he took advantage of an oversight to escape from the police station.

After several months of investigation, close monitoring of his partner has allowed the Fleeing from Justice team of the Central Operative Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard to locate him in Marbella.

In the town he lived on the Golden Mile,

The adventures of Pinto da Costa, born in Paris in 1986, began in July 2016, when he was arrested with 700,000 euros in cash.

He was considered a fundamental part of a money laundering network from drug trafficking that operated between Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain, which is credited with laundering more than 70 million euros.

He was sentenced to ten years in prison, of which he served more than four.

He then began to enjoy prison leave and, in one of them, he did not return to jail.

He vanished.

And the Court of Marseille, in the south of the French country, then issued an International Arrest and Surrender Order (OIDE).

He had five and a half years left on his sentence to serve.

Two years later, in September 2021, the Portuguese Judicial Police found him in Faro, in the Algarve.

The success was fleeting.

The man was carrying false documentation under the name of Fernando Domingues and, while the agents certified his real identity, he took advantage of an oversight to flee the police station.

Shortly after, the Portuguese and French authorities alerted the Civil Guard that the fugitive could have hidden in Spain.

The Central Operations Unit, together with the Technical Unit of the Judicial Police, then started a series of discreet surveillance on various people in the area around Pinto da Costa.

One of them was his partner.

The woman, French of Moroccan origin, lives in the south of Portugal in a villa valued at two million euros and soon caught the attention of the agents.

They verified how she, periodically, moved to Spain.

She did it to a specific place, Marbella, the usual destination for fugitives from justice because of the facilities they get to go unnoticed while they can enjoy a luxurious life.

The police pursuit narrowed little by little on the girl.

And during the month of December, on one of the occasions, they managed to see her next to her objective in the parking lot of a commercial area in Marbella.

"At that moment the agents identified them and corroborated by physical examination without any doubt the identity of the suspect," says the Civil Guard in a statement.

Immediately afterwards, they arrested him inside a supermarket.

He was carrying a false identity.

On his driver's license he wore the name of Paco Arnaud Van Damme although they later confirmed his identity again.

According to what the investigators were able to find out, the fugitive lived in the Golden Mile area of ​​Marbella, drove luxury cars and his children attended the best private schools.

The Fleeing from Justice team that has arrested Pinto da Costa is the same that at the beginning of 2022 arrested Sarah Panitzke, one of the most wanted British criminals in the United Kingdom after she escaped in 2013 while on trial.

She was located in Tarragona and is accused of being a fundamental part of a VAT fraud scam in her country, where it is believed that she defrauded more than 1,000 million pounds (about 1,100 million euros).

Throughout 2022, this police group accumulated other arrests such as those of Fredy Castillo Carrillo Pinocho, a Colombian claimed by the Colombian authorities for crimes of homicide and his participation in guerrilla groups or that of Fernando Moreno Sorni, sentenced in absentia to 19 years in prison. imprisonment for belonging to a criminal organization and for money laundering.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-01-02

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