The police arrested the suspects at the Marbella bus station, just as they were about to board. Plainclothes policemen had been trailing them waiting for an opportunity to pounce.

The suspects, a group of young Romanians, had a backpack full of perfume bottles – the rest of the booty was in one of their homes.

Police calculate that the perfume recovered was worth 90,000 euros. They also found stolen clothes from Nerja, too, worth 4,000 euros.

It was the Marbella police that advised their Nerja colleagues that a Romanian gang had ‘settled’ in Marbella, suspected of trafficking in stolen shop items, mainly perfume.

The police moved in when three of the suspects were about to board the 11.30 bus bound for Madrid. The backpack contained 128 bottles of top-brand perfume.

When quizzed, the gang members made a number of contradictory statements, which more or less sealed their fate.

A search of one of their flats, which had been staked out previously, ‘harvested’ 1,347 perfume bottle, as well as 73 items of clothing and footwear, which had been taken from different shops in Nerja

A perfume-shop owner on Avenida Castilla Pérez in Nerja – the shop had been burgled on the 31st of March – was asked to take a look at the recovered items and she had no problem recognizing her missing stock, as they all bore the same code-markings as used in the shop.

The arrested Romanians are all aged between 23 and 30.

(News: Nerja, Axarquia, Costa del Sol, Malaga, Andalucia)