BARCELONA (Reuters) – Spanish police have arrested a special adviser to the prime minister of Guinea-Bissau, on the island of Tenerife in an investigation into suspected corruption and drug trafficking involving police officers, authorities said on Friday.
Following Wednesday’s arrest, a court in Tenerife ordered that Lebanon-born Mohamed Jamil Derbah, who is a Tenerife resident, be remanded in jail without bail as the suspected leader of a crime ring, while others were released.
“Nine people were arrested on Wednesday in an operation by police internal affairs. Two were retired police officers and one is serving,” a Spanish National Police spokesperson said on Friday.
Guinea Bissau’s prime minister, Rui Duarte de Barros, appointed Derbah as his special aide and a permanent member of the International Relations and Trade Commission in 2024.
The prime minister’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Derbah could not be reached for comment.
In 2001, Reuters reported of Derbah’s arrest by Spanish authorities for alleged involvement in a fraud ring in the Canary Islands which may have had links to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and the pro-Syrian Shi’ite Amal movement.
There were no reports later of his conviction.
Authorities said then that the ring was involved in timeshare fraud which affected several British and German citizens. The police also said that Derbah began his alleged criminal activities under the guidance of John Palmer, a British multi-millionaire who was sentenced to eight years in prison by a London court in 2001 for timeshare fraud and who was killed in 2015.
(Reporting by Graham Keeley and Andrei Khalip; additional reporting by Alberto Dabo in Bissau; Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Leslie Adler)
