A police officer from the judicial police (illustration) -

PASTORNICOLAS / SIPA

  • Twenty-seven suspected members of the Georgian mafia Vory v Zakone were arrested a week ago in five departments in western France.

  • They are accused of having committed numerous organized thefts throughout the country.

  • At the end of the police custody, thirteen men and two women were indicted.

They are suspected of belonging to the powerful Georgian mafia Vory v Zakone (the thief in the law in French) whose members obey a very strict code.

Twenty-seven people were arrested on February 9 and 10 in Ille-et-Vilaine, Gironde, Vendée, Morbihan and Deux-Sèvres, we learned on Tuesday from the public prosecutor of Rennes.

They are accused of numerous acts of theft and money laundering in an organized group on the national territory.

The investigation began in April 2019 after an attempted murder committed on March 20, 2019 on a Georgian national in the Maurepas district of Rennes.

The investigations then made it possible to uncover the existence of a criminal network belonging to the mafia of "thieves in the law" in the West.

The head of the network allegedly arrested in La Roche-sur-Yon

During the investigation, the central direction of judicial police, helped by the Georgian police, managed to identify one of the heads of the criminal network, a 58-year-old man living in La Roche-sur-Yon in Vendée.

“Inducted by his peers in the early 1990s, he extended his influence over four groups of individuals spread across the west of France, from Brittany to New Aquitaine,” explains the public prosecutor.

Its teams are said to have engaged in numerous aggravated thefts throughout the country, also participating in the trafficking of cigarettes.

"For each of these illicit activities, the" thief in the law "received a share, including when he intervened on several occasions within the community to settle conflicts as a justice of the peace", details the prosecutor.

Thirteen men and two women indicted

During searches carried out at the homes of the suspects, five vehicles, numerous jewels and 53,500 euros in cash were seized.

Approximately 280 cartridges of cigarettes, tooling material, aluminum bags used for shoplifting as well as a sawn-off shotgun and bulletproof vest were also found.

At the end of the custody, thirteen men and two women aged between 31 and 70 years, and for many already known to justice, were presented to an investigating magistrate and indicted.

Ten of them, including the network leader, were remanded in custody and the other five were placed under judicial supervision.

Miscellaneous

He roamed the corridors of the Toulouse hospital to steal computers and bank cards

Bordeaux

Six people who exploited unaccompanied minors convicted in an emblematic trial in Bordeaux

  • Justice

  • Aquitaine

  • Georgia

  • Nantes

  • Investigation

  • Reindeer

  • Bordeaux

  • Flight

  • Mafia