14 Nov, 2020 @ 17:00
1 min read

€22 MILLION train vandals arrested in Spain

Train Graffiti Renfe Wikimedia

NEARLY 100 graffiti vandals who caused €22 MILLION worth of damage to trains in just three years have been arrested in Spain.

The 99 detained men and women are said to be responsible for thousands of incidents that disfigured RENFE and Metro trains, with the gang being based in Barcelona.

Operation Awakening was launched by National Police and the Mossos d’Esquadra Catalan force in September 2019.

Train Graffiti Renfe Wikimedia
More than 6,700 graffiti attacks on trains in just three years

Police who had been keeping previous graffiti attacks learned that the vandals considered it easy to daub tarins in Catalunya with little chance of ever being caught.

The investigation focuses on the 6,741 complaints filed by train operator RENFE and Metro Barcelona during 2017, 2018 and 2019

The operation was carried out in two phases, the first aimed at finding the 51 alleged perpetrators who lived outside Catalunya. Arrestes were made in in Madrid, Castilla y Leon, Castilla La-Mancha, Oviedo, the Basque Country, Aragon, Valencia and Andalucia.

In the second phase, developed jointly with the Mossos d’Esquadra, 48 people were arrested in Barcelona, Tarragona and Girona.

Among those detained was a graffiti artist who worked as a ticket agent through a company subcontracted by RENFE, and a young man who travelled all the way from Milan in Italy with the sole purpose of carrying out graffiti attacks. He was arrested as he disembarked a plane after landing at Barcelona-El Prat Airport.

Police say that 48% of all graffiti attacks on Spanish trains and metros involved vandals coming from Catalunya.

Dilip Kuner

Dilip Kuner is a NCTJ-trained journalist whose first job was on the Folkestone Herald as a trainee in 1988.
He worked up the ladder to be chief reporter and sub editor on the Hastings Observer and later news editor on the Bridlington Free Press.
At the time of the first Gulf War he started working for the Sunday Mirror, covering news stories as diverse as Mick Jagger’s wedding to Jerry Hall (a scoop gleaned at the bar at Heathrow Airport) to massive rent rises at the ‘feudal village’ of Princess Diana’s childhood home of Althorp Park.
In 1994 he decided to move to Spain with his girlfriend (now wife) and brought up three children here.
He initially worked in restaurants with his father, before rejoining the media world in 2013, working in the local press before becoming a copywriter for international firms including Accenture, as well as within a well-known local marketing agency.
He joined the Olive Press as a self-employed journalist during the pandemic lock-down, becoming news editor a few months later.
Since then he has overseen the news desk and production of all six print editions of the Olive Press and had stories published in UK national newspapers and appeared on Sky News.

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