Spain vowed Tuesday to take a hard line against organised crime groups, a day after European police swooped on a Georgian criminal gang that used the country as its nerve centre. 'We are sending a very strong message to the mafia gangs: 'Do not come because you are not welcome. More than that, you will end up in prison',' Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba told public radio RNE. 'This is a message that they understand very well. Mafia gangs move and go where they are most comfortable. Here they will be very, very, very ill at ease.' Spain does not have major domestic organised crime groups although those from other nations, particularly from Italy and eastern Europe, are active in the country. Police in six European countries arrested 69 people on Monday in a crackdown on a highly structured Georgian criminal gang which stole and trafficked goods around the continent. The largest number of arrests, 24, were carried out in Spain but suspects were also detained in Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. The suspects, who led deliberately low-key lives while allegedly coordinating crime, were held on suspicion of drugs and weapons trafficking, money laundering, extortion and conspiracy to murder. 'These people would steal jewels for example, and send them to a central location in Spain, and from here they would be sent to Georgia,' said Rubalcaba. The operation is the third in Spain in recent years against organised crime gangs from eastern Europe. Operation Avispa in 2005 and 2006 led to the arrests of 28 Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians and Spaniards. In Operation Troika in 2008, Spanish police broke up an organised crime network based in the Russian city of St Petersburg, arresting 20 people. Police described that gang, the Tambovskaya-Malyshevskaya, as 'one of the four biggest in the world'. Spanish police have also made scores of arrests in recent years of members of the Camorra, the organised crime syndicate of the Naples region, and of Sicily's Cosa Nostra Mafia. 