Seventy people were arrested during a police sweep conducted in central Athens late on Wednesday night, between 5:30-11:30 p.m.

Police officers conducted checks of 1236 individuals and 275 vehicles, bringing 438 people into police stations for questioning. Of the 70 placed under arrest, 52 were illegal immigrants and will be detained pending deportation from the country, 12 were arrested for prostitution-related offences, five for gambling and one for drug offences.

Police also confiscated 23 doses of heroin weighting 7.4 grammes and wrote tickets for 183 traffic code violations.

Earlier on Wednesday, police and financial crime squad officers also conducted a raid on two houses on Fylis Street where they found 18 foreign nationals lacking valid documents, as well as ten fake passports of various countries, five Italian foreign national registration documents and another three Italian documents, four visas, 38 photographs of foreign nationals and two computer hard disks that are now being investigated. One foreign national was arrested as the person responsible for the building.

Small teams of police also patrolled to locate illegal street traders, confiscated 1509 articles on sale.