The Spain police have arrested a man that reportedly stole around 2 million face masks from a company that had gone bust.

Investigators said that the suspect sold the masks and other protective equipment including surgical gloves to contacts in Portugal.

The equipment was taken from a medical supplies company that had gone into liquidation and kept the stock at a locked warehouse in the Galician Cathedral City of Santiago de Compostela.

It is believed that the robbery happened at the end of February before thousands of hospital workers in Spain got infected with the coronavirus.

Because of the incident, the government of Spain was forced to buy face masks from China.

Alfonso Rueda, the vice-president of the regional Xunta de Galicia regional Government, visited the site that had stored the face masks.

Upon getting there, they realized that only 100 of the 2 million face masks stored there had been left untouched.

Rueda released a statement about the incident.

Rueda said:

“The police received a tip-off that there could have been valuable health equipment here which would have been so necessary in the fight against Covid-19. It had been cleaned out by the time they arrived. We calculate two million face masks have been stolen. Only the boxes are left. There are also empty boxes which contained surgical gloves but we don’t know at this stage exactly how many are missing. The police investigation has led to the identification and arrest of the main suspect, a person from Santiago who has already appeared in court.”

The suspect has been identified as a director at a well-known real estate firm in the locality.