Police in Spain and France have arrested 27 people and seized 1.5 tonnes of live baby eels, as well as goods worth more than €2m (£1.7m), after breaking up a gang dedicated to breeding the critically endangered fishes and smuggling them to China.
Officers also recovered tonnes of frozen baby eels, called elvers, which are prized as a delicacy in Spain and parts of Asia, that had not been subject to any food safety checks and were not suitable for human consumption.
Given its critically endangered status on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list of threatened species, the European eel (Anguilla anguilla) is subject to EU quotas on fishing and distribution, and its export beyond the bloc is strictly forbidden.
Over recent years, however, the baby eels have caught the attention of many criminal gangs who smuggle the fish from Europe to Asia, where they can fetch up to €5,000 a kilogram.
The joint police operation – which involved Spain’s Guardia Civil, France’s Gendarmerie nationale, Europol and the European Anti-Fraud Office (Olaf) – began in 2021 when customs and police officers were alerted to “irregularities” in the European trade of elvers and eels.
Officers soon uncovered an international criminal gang, based in northern Spain and southern France, which was engaged in an illegal supply and distribution operation.
“This group, which was made up of fishers as well as business managers and wholesalers, took it upon itself to circumvent the legal supply of live baby eels by supplying them to citizens of Chinese origin who had clandestine hatcheries in parts of Paris and Antwerp,” the Guardia Civil said in a statement.
“From there, they organised trips to Asia for people who departed from European airports close to the hatcheries, carrying eels hidden in their luggage.”
Officers discovered that 14 tonnes of young eels and 31 tonnes of adult eels – worth more than €6.7m on the legal market – had been removed from the official supply chain.
After more than 30 simultaneous searches of homes, business and clandestine hatcheries in Spain, France, Belgium and Poland, police arrested 27 people on suspicion of belonging to a criminal organisation, trafficking in a protected species, smuggling and money laundering.
The Guardia Civil said the live eels they had recovered had been transferred to a government fish farm in the northern Spanish region of Navarra and would be released into the wild.
“By doing so, we will achieve one of the most difficult aims of the fight against trafficking, which is the complete reintroduction of the seized specimens so as to contribute to their long-term conservation.”
