Police Raid The Bahrain Victorious Team AGAIN just one day aead of the Tour de France in Copenhagen
For the Third time in the past 12 months, Bahrain Victorious has been raided by police. This time, the raid was issued by Europol, and executed by Danish Police in Copenhagen. Today, at 5:30 AM Danish police searched all the hotel rooms, cars, and equipment vehicles of the Bahrain Victorious team.
Bahrain seems to be brushing the raids off as a bit of a joke. The teams attitude suggests that the raids are only an attempt to damage their name while claiming their teams innocence. The teams performance manager, Vladimir Miholjević told VeloNews “We’re sleeping like babies and working like horses. We’re showing everything through our results and we are 100 percent transparent.” Vladimir, also went on to say. “They just came, with warrants, and actually the reasons in the warrant are really funny. This we can’t tell you because we are still talking to our legal team on how to put that out. But you will see. It is extremely funny.”
The important thing to understand here is that it’s not easy to attain search warrants. For a judge to approve the execution of these searches on an international level there needs to be substantial evidence pointing in the direction of guilty. The courts wouldn’t be chasing this case unless they had substantial evidence. It’s that simple.
The tricky part is executing these warrants because the timing is everything in finding what the police are looking for. It’s also important to mention how easy it would be for the team to hide whatever it is the police are looking for. According to Vladimir, Europol didn’t state what they were searching for which is interesting to say the least. Hypothetically, it would be easy for someone close to the team to privately book hotel rooms, and carry whatever it is that the police are searching for. This is a barrier that the Police would have a hard time over coming because they wouldn’t be able to execute searches on a random person not listed as staff or associate of the team.
None the less, the extent of the police operation and the amount of resources being pulled into investing Bahrain-Victorious is alarming. This is anything but a joke and it should be very concerning for the entire cycling community.