Six men have been detained by the National Police on suspicion of involvement in crimes including child prostitution, sexual assault, and child pornography in Tenerife. The suspects allegedly facilitated the prostitution of underage girls at various levels, from profiting through transport arrangements to securing hotel bookings without registering the victims.
A report from an employee at a center for supervised minors alerted investigators from the National Police’s GRUME unit, triggering the inquiry.
The worker said that messages found on the phone of one of the girls indicated that she might be engaging in prostitution.
Acting on this information, investigators deployed a range of measures both in the physical world and online to determine the scope of the situation. Tracking advertisements on websites, messaging channels, and hotel bookings revealed a potential pattern involving multiple underage victims.
Through methods such as virtual patrols and analysis of collected sexual material, investigators were able to bypass security measures used by the suspects and identify six men as the alleged perpetrators of the crimes described.
Two of the suspects were managers at a sex club in southern Tenerife where the girls were reportedly exploited, and they allegedly tried to coerce the victims to conceal their involvement.
Despite these efforts, investigators identified five underage girls who were victims of these acts, with authorities not ruling out the possibility that there were additional victims.
Following judicial authorization, the National Police established a geographic operation in Tenerife that involved 50 officers from the Santa Cruz de Tenerife Provincial Police Station. Five searches were conducted, culminating in the detention of six men for their suspected roles in the investigated crimes.
During the operation, investigators seized 15 smartphones, a laptop, and several external storage devices.
Among those detained were the managers of a well-known entertainment venue in the southern Tenerife area who allegedly recruited these minors and exploited them sexually outside the club’s operating hours.
After questioning, the detainees were handed over to the competent judicial authority, which ordered the pre-trial detention of three of them.
The National Police have launched a second phase of the investigation, identifying more than 200 buyers of child pornography across Spain, as well as new clients and facilitators of child prostitution. Further arrests are anticipated as the inquiry continues [Police statements, Tenerife, ongoing investigation].