One of the UK’s most wanted men, who’s suspected of distributing large amounts of Class A drugs in the southwest portion of England, has been allowed to walk free by the authorities in Portugal, despite an extradition request by the UK.
Alex Male, 30, was arrested at Lisbon Airport on April 30 on suspicion of using a fraudulent passport.
He had been refused entry into Turkey because of the allegedly bogus document and immediately flew to Portugal.
But a spokesman for the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) told The Epoch Times in an email: “We have been made aware that following a habeas corpus application to Portugal’s Supreme Court, Alex Male’s release was authorised following the expiry of his custody time limit in the country.
“We are liaising with partners in the UK and Portugal to assess the ruling and its implications. UK law enforcement remains determined to find fugitives and return them to face justice.”
Habeas corpus is a Latin term meaning “you shall have the body” and is a legal term for when a court orders that a person in custody be presented and either charged or released.
The details of how Male came to be released aren’t yet clear, but the release comes as a major blow to the NCA, which heralded his arrest earlier this year as a “fantastic result.”
Male, who was from the town of Weston-super-Mare, near Bristol, is wanted as part of a South West Regional Organised Crime Unit investigation into drugs supply.
In May the NCA stated that Male had been based in the Spanish resort of Marbella.
When he was arrested, the agency’s international liaison officer, Phil Robinson, said: “Male naively believed he could travel across international borders using fraudulent documentation and remain undetected by law enforcement. But he underestimated the vigilance and expertise of the Turkish border police, which enabled the Portuguese authorities to act.
“Any arrest of a fugitive is a fantastic result, even more so since Male had only recently been added to our most wanted list. He is wanted in connection with dangerous crimes, which have a devastating impact on communities, so I’m delighted he has been caught.”
At one time 50,000 people—more than 9,000 of them in the UK—were using EncroChat to send and receive secure messages.
But in March 2020, French police, using malware in the form of a software update, managed to hack into EncroChat’s network, which was hosted on a server in the town of Roubaix in France, and infiltrated tens of thousands of encrypted messages.
The messages were shared with the NCA in the UK, which launched Operation Venetic and claimed to have identified hundreds of criminals who were dealing in drugs and guns and plotting murders.
