This morning, the Fiamme Gialle aeronaval of Taranto implemented an executive order of personal precautionary measures, issued by the competent GIP of the local Court at the request of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Ionian capital, against 21 people, 9 in prison and 12 under house arrest. The subjects arrested are seriously suspected, in various capacities, of the crimes of criminal association and environmental disaster.
The investigations, also of a technical nature, started already in 2021 and coordinated by the local Public Prosecutor’s Office, allowed the Financiers of the Naval Operational Section of Taranto to reveal how the suspects would have been part of an organization operating in the provinces of Taranto, Bari and Brindisi, continuously dedicated to the capture and processing of sea cucumbers, aimed at subsequent export, resulting in their gradual disappearance from the Ionian coast.
Due to the principle of “presumption of innocence”, the responsibility of the persons subjected to investigations will be definitively ascertained only in the event of an irrevocable conviction.
In particular, between 2022 and 2023, in response to the evidence, the military seized, from some suspects, over five tons of echinoderms fraudulently fished in the waters of the Taranto coast, two rooms illegally used for the storage and processing of sea cucumbers and arrested a 50-year-old Chinese citizen who had created a real laboratory, without any health authorization, equipped with dryers, for the processing and subsequent export of the “Holothuroidea” species.
The organization used foreign hauliers to ship the fished product while still alive to Greece and Turkey, but also unsuspecting operators from well-known logistics companies for national and foreign shipments of the processed and dried product.
These echinoderms, also known as “sea cucumbers”, are very valuable, both for fish poachers and for the broker system that takes care of their export to China, where the value of dried sea cucumbers reaches even €700 per kilogram, with peaks of €3,000 per kilogram.
A millionaire turnover, discovered already in 2017, thanks to the “Blue Desert” operation, coordinated by the local Public Prosecutor’s Office, which laid the foundations for the recognition – by the Court of Cassation – of poaching as an environmental crime , through the pioneering application – by investigators and the Taranto judiciary – of the so-called “Ecoreati”, introduced into the Penal Code with Law 68/2015.
The Fiamme Gialle of the Naval Operational Section of the Guardia di Finanza of Taranto, in collaboration with soldiers of the Provincial Command of Taranto and Brindisi, of the Air-Naval Group of Taranto, of the Naval Station of Bari, of the Naval Operational Section of Brindisi and with the with the help of a helicopter from the Bari Air Section, in implementation of the exclusive prerogatives of the “Sea Police”, concluded, today, an important service operation inflicting a heavy blow on the professionals of “poaching” and, more in general, of the so-called “Green Crimes”.
The constant monitoring of the coastal coast and the waters under regional jurisdiction of the Bari Air and Naval Operations Department, in addition to ensuring, through the maintenance of operations over the course of 24 hours, a decisive action to prevent and combat the crimes perpetrated, makes it possible to safeguarding environmental resources, public health and a healthy economy.
