British fugitives finding Spain no place to hide

Mark Lilley is arrested in his villa near Malaga.

The shaky handheld camera. The barking dogs. The hovering helicopter. The crack of splintered wood as the metal "enforcer" smashes its way into the villa. The garish four-poster bed. The hidden pistol. The bolted "panic room". Yes, it must be the latest flashy crime procedural to hit our screens, wearing all its cliches as proudly as a freshly inked tattoo.

But no, this film was made by the Spanish police and it showed the arrest this month of a fugitive British criminal. Mark Lilley, aka "Fatboy", "Mandy" and "Big Vern", a 41-year-old drug dealer from Merseyside, was arrested after more than 12 years on the run. The whole operation, from the scaling of the front gates of his villa in Alhaurin de la Torre near Malaga, to the exposure of his en suite lair, was captured on film. Although trained in the Brazilian martial art of vale tudo (which means "anything goes"), and guarded by three large dogs, Lilley went quietly.

The arrest came two months after another Briton on the run, Andrew Moran, was grabbed by his pool in Calpe on Spain's Costa Blanca. That arrest was also filmed, although Moran disobligingly spoiled his close-up by vaulting over a wall and pulling his T-shirt over his head before he was finally caught.

He had escaped four years earlier from Burnley crown court, where he was convicted in his absence of conspiring to commit armed robbery. Lilley was the 51st criminal on the 65-strong Operation Captura wanted list - drawn up by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) - to have his collar felt on the Costas. But to some it seems strange that British criminals still opt for Spanish hideaways. Have they never seen Sexy Beast?

"The attraction for Spain is still there, as there is a huge expat British population," said Dave Allen, head of the fugitives unit at Soca. But there are other European options. "The language is not too much of an issue in the Netherlands either - the Dutch speak very good English and are culturally similar to the British, so it's easy to fit in."

But some are now looking further afield: "The places we're seeing them go to now are Thailand, certainly, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates."

He said that 133 fugitives were arrested abroad at the request of Britain last year. "The people we put on the Crimestoppers website - it's not a top 10 most wanted list; that's an American thing - are the ones seen to be the most dangerous. They are wanted for violent crimes, predatory sex offences and the like."

The arrests of Lilley and Moran represent something of a coup for Soca, helped by the fact that they were filmed and thus received maximum publicity. Another high-profile fugitive was apprehended in Athens on the same day as Lilley, but the Greek police did not film it, so it received less coverage. Kevin Hanley, from Fulham, west London, wanted in connection with drug dealing, was caught as he tucked into sausage, eggs and soda bread in front of the Lions v Wallabies game at Molly Malone's pub in the suburb of Glyfada. The police knew he was a rugby fan and had staked out the limited number of places in Athens where the big game could be watched.

Jason Coghlan, a former armed robber from Manchester who served time with Lilley as a category A prisoner in Strangeways, now runs a Marbella law firm, JaCogLaw, which advises ex-pats who are in trouble with the authorities. Its website boasts an impressive series of quotations from Aristotle to Gladstone, although the one probably most likely to catch the eye of potential clients is from 18th-century jurist William Blackstone: "Better that 10 guilty men escape justice than that one innocent man goes to prison."

Coghlan, who is setting up a similar outfit in Bangkok, thinks that Spain is a daft place to hide. "If you're a villain on the run in Spain, you're just in a queue waiting to get nicked ... the Spanish police can even trace where your emails are coming from. Being on the run is no life - and it's no life for the family of someone on the run. Some of them think that, with the passage of time, their sentences will be reduced. But the sentences don't go away."

He said that if he were on the run himself, he would probably head for eastern Europe, either Albania or Romania. "A lot of the armed robbers come to Spain because they can go into drug smuggling - it's the number one place, not just because of the hashish from Morocco but because of cocaine coming in from Mexico."

Coghlan said he thought the tip-offs that led to the arrests of Britons generally came not from sharp-eyed members of the public but from other members of the underground: "If someone throws their weight around and makes a nuisance of themselves, that might lead to a tip-off."

- Observer