Published Date: 14 September 2008
By David Leask
PROSECUTORS have revealed a massive increase in the number of serious criminals from EU nations extradited from Scotland after trying to escape justice in their homeland.
Extraditions from Scotland to EU nations have increased 10-fold since 2003, soaring from just six cases to 60 already this year.
Fugitives wanted in their home countries for offences ranging from embezzlement and theft to rape have targeted Scotland, attracted by existing immigrant communities as well as the remote geography.
Almost half of the extraditions are to eastern European states admitted after EU expansion in 2004, and Poles make up approximately a third of the total.
David Dickson, the deputy head of the Crown Office department responsible for extraditions, said: "We have been averaging at two or three a week this summer. About 30% of them are for people from Poland."
Based on population, Scotland is attracting more fleeing EU criminals than England. Scotland accounts for 9% of the UK population but gets 15% of the UK's extradition requests.
Dickson said: "Perhaps people think that somewhere like Scotland they have the chance to escape the long arm of the law. Well, they're wrong."
The case of Polish migrant worker Robert Labutin is typical. For two years he hid in Edinburgh with a job, girlfriend, baby, council house, bank loan and a sick mother to look after. But the 30-year-old was also a fugitive and should have been serving a two-year sentence in his native Poland for drug-dealing.
He was also wanted in his home town of Koszalin, in the country's north-west, on an allegation that, along with another party, he used threats to force a child to have sex. If found guilty, he will face up to 15 years in jail.
Labutin, who lived in Bo'ness, was last month ordered to be extradited to Poland. He had, Edinburgh Sheriff Court heard last month, been "unlawfully at large" in the country.
In another case, 38-year-old Czech Michal Trajer was extradited in March. He was due to serve four and a half years for rape and embezzlement in Prostejov, in the east of the country, but fled to Scotland.
They were caught thanks to the new European arrest warrants, which are used by authorities across the continent to hunt down fugitives.
Scottish authorities are increasingly plugged into international crime-fighting bodies. The Crown Office, for example, has a lawyer in Madrid and another at EuroJust, an international network of magistrates and prosecutors based in The Hague that helped more than 1,000 cross-border investigations last year.
Like Labutin, many fugitives simply fail to do enough to hide their identities. Labutin even rented his council house in his own name.
Perhaps the biggest name caught under a European arrest warrant so far is Antonio La Torre. A major figure in the Camorra, the Neapolitan answer to the Sicilian Mafia, La Torre was extradited from Aberdeen in 2005.
Bill Aitken, the Tory justice spokesman and a former justice of the peace, yesterday said: "Scotland must ensure it's playing its part in enforcing these warrants, which are a very good thing. Otherwise the word could get out we are a soft touch."
Piotr Leszczynski, Poland's vice-consul in Edinburgh, stressed his fellow countrymen rarely posed a problem for the police in Scotland.
"There are currently around 40 people imprisoned in Scotland," he said. "Just 12 of them have been sentenced. Whenever we meet the police, they stress they don't have any particular issues with our nationals."
Leszczynski, however, admitted there was some frustration with "complications" finding fugitive nationals in the UK, mostly because, unlike in Poland, there is no national database of residents.
Polish authorities last year sought more than 250 fugitives in England and Wales alone. As many as one in 20 of them had been in trouble in the UK before they were caught. At one point there were so many people awaiting to be extradited that the Polish government sent a charter plane to pick them up.
