The Balkans are now the centre of Europe’s people smuggling web

It was, said David Furtner of the Austrian police, “a very close call”. The three young children had been crammed into a truck with more than 20 other people when they were stopped on Friday in the small town of St Peter am Hart, close to the German border. The children and their parents – from Syria, Afghanistan and Bangladesh – were taken to hospital in the nearby town of Braunau and their 29-year-old driver, a Romanian, was arrested.
“Medical staff told us they would not have made it much longer,” said Furtner of the children, who, he added, were dizzy, dehydrated and in a critical condition.
They were, at least, alive. A day before, Austrian police arrived at the hard shoulder of the A4 between Neusiedl and Parndorf to find an abandoned white truck filled with the bodies of 71 people who had suffocated. There had been no last-minute rescue for them. So terribly decomposed were their corpses that passersby noticed putrid liquid dripping from the air-tight interior once used for transporting frozen chicken. Inside, police found no air vents. The refrigerated lining of the truck had been ripped away in places, suggesting frantic, doomed attempts at escape. Four children were among the dead, the youngest only a year old.
Until now the focus of Europe’s escalating migration crisis has been on those people risking life and limb to cross the Mediterranean from north Africa, rendering the tens of thousands crossing the western Balkans relatively unnoticed. Last week’s events in Austria changed that.
As the police investigation continues to widen into the alleged smuggling syndicate behind the tragedy discovered on Thursday, the EU’s police agency Europol revealed on Saturday that it had scheduled high-level operational meetings into the deaths for this week at its Hague headquarters. Officers from at least six countries will be present, a simple indicator of the coordinated, multinational nature of the criminal gangs that control the increasingly popular – and arguably increasingly risky – route.

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Latest figures show that the winding smuggling route through Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary and into Austria, the first western European country the migrants and refugees pass through, is significantly more frequented now than the route across the Mediterranean.
Between January and July this year, 102,342 people crossed into Austria via the western Balkans, more than 10,000 higher than the total who entered Europe via the so-called “central Mediterranean” route, according to Frontex, the EU border control agency.
Although not as treacherous – more than 2,500 people have drowned attempting to cross the Mediterranean this year, most recently up to 300 people off the coast of Libya – the western Balkans route is also fraught with peril. Amnesty International reiterated warnings that dangerous criminals were continuing to prey on the thousands of vulnerable migrants and refugees travelling north via Macedonia, citing “violent abuse and extortion at the hands of the authorities and criminal gangs”.

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A migrant woman holds a child after arriving at the port of Piraeus near Athens. Photograph: Stoyan Nenov/Reuters

Some may have even suffered at the hands of the alleged Bulgarian-Hungarian mafia gang believed to be responsible for the truck carrying the 71 dead. What is clear is that those behind that tragedy had links to other criminal gangs known to the authorities.

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Europol’s intelligence database stores the data from 500 agencies across Europe and quickly spotted a connection between those arrested and other syndicates. By Friday lunchtime, shortly after the truck’s driver had been apprehended, the agency had identified a network of criminality that stretches throughout the continent.
“We quickly established a connection in our intelligence database with one or more of the suspects and that connection was very instrumental to the Austrian authorities and has opened up some new lines of inquiry that we are now coordinating with many European countries. We are very much on top of this case,” said Rob Wainwright, the Cardiff-born head of Europol.
The latest intelligence assessment of criminality in the western Balkans – an area with a well-known history of violence, instability and organised crime – is worrying. It is now beyond doubt that some of the region’s most unscrupulous and established criminal syndicates have moved into migrant smuggling. A third of the 130 ongoing Europol investigations into people smuggling are, the Observer has learned, linked to criminal gangs that have previously had form for drug trafficking, supplying girls to the sex trade or money laundering. On Friday the agency said it had now identified 3,000 serious players linked to people-smuggling in Europe, including a number of Britons.
The sheer number of vulnerable migrants moving through the western Balkans guarantees, according to police sources, an easy income stream for the Balkans’ longstanding criminal gangs. Izabella Cooper, spokesperson for Frontex, added that the numbers involved – Germany expects a record 750,000 asylum-seekers to arrive this year – means that people-smuggling is probably the most lucrative line of work for European criminals to be in.
“It’s probably more profitable now than drugs or weapons smuggling,” she said, adding that moneymaking opportunities were ample for smugglers. “It’s a huge logistical base in terms of organisational transportation, finding accommodation, safe houses, being able to sell them water and food.”
Wainwright also conceded that Europe’s criminals were increasingly spotting the plight of migrants – many of them refugees fleeing war zones and persecution in countries like Syria – as ripe for “making a quick buck”. For the migrants themselves, the costs demanded by smugglers vary wildly on the western Balkans route.

Those fleeing Syria, for instance, must typically pay a fee of around $1,000 (£649) to squeeze into an inflatable dinghy for the short but perilous passage from the Turkish coast to nearby Greek islands, typically Kos. (Some, though, say they have paid double that.) From there, they hope a Greek government-chartered ferry will transport them to the mainland and, once there, the overland journey north begins. Inside Macedonia, migrants pay, on average, $500 to smugglers to navigate the country using off-road routes to Serbia, a journey that can take 10 days. Cooper says many are “led through the forests” by their guides. This stage of the journey to Europe pushes many to their physical limits. Investigators for Amnesty International documented a grim pilgrimage. “Walking through all weathers, over mountains and wading through rivers, sometimes without food and water for days on end, the challenges are immense. Exhaustion, pain and hunger take both a physical and a psychological toll,” reads a paragraph from a 70-page report into the dangers to migrants tackling the western Balkans route.

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A woman discusses the slow process in acquiring her transit papers with a member of the UNHCR in Kos, Greece. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Some, the wealthy, often choose to pay smugglers upfront for bespoke packages where each stage of the journey to western Europe is organised in advance, a strategy that avoids them negotiating with separate criminal gangs on each leg. “A lot of the smuggling is orchestrated from end to end. A range of criminal services are offered to potential migrants, for example a premium service from Syria all the way to the UK or France for $15,000,” said Wainwright. “The smugglers will manage every section using established criminal links right the way through Europe.”

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One of the more extraordinary facets of the unprecedented influx of men, women and children entering Europe is how inexorably the numbers continue to rise. During 2010 just 2,370 refugees and migrants were recorded crossing into Austria via the western Balkans. Last Monday alone 8,000, mostly refugees from Syria, poured into Serbia from Macedonia in the space of 24 hours. Days earlier Macedonia had closed its border with Greece, saying it could take no more. It mattered not: crowds braved batons and stun grenades to storm through police lines.
On Wednesday, Hungarian police fired teargas at migrants near its border with Serbia, but still the migrants headed north, often by road, often at high speed. A suspected Romanian trafficker remains under arrest after his van, carrying at least 18 Syrian migrants, overturned on Friday on the M5 highway in Hungary.
The routes used by smugglers in the western Balkans quickly shift, say police. Launch a crackdown on one section and another quickly emerges to bypass the authorities.
“The criminal syndicates are very risk sensitive. We see routes ebbing and flowing according to the perception of the criminals where the greatest law enforcement resources might be,” said Wainwright. Experts also accept that the desperation of the migrants means that even the most ruthless criminal gangs can find work smuggling them.
“People are too desperate to care. You don’t need a good reputation on the basis that if you run a safe operation then maybe you get more customers,” added Cooper.
This disregard for human safety recently prompted the UN to warn of the escalating risk of “abuse and violence” to migrants travelling through the western Balkans. Amnesty documents evidence of refugees being “vulnerable to attack and robbery by armed groups”. It details instances of migrants being forced to pay €100 bribes to Serbian border officials.
But those navigating the western Balkans are not merely abused by the region’s mafia. Latest intelligence assessments show that Syrian criminal syndicates are also highly involved in facilitating escape from the conflict-ridden country and that underworld figures from western Europe are also heavily implicated.
“There are British criminals involved, trying to exploit the fact that so many migrants are trying to reach the UK and also because of historical criminal links along long-held traditional ethnic links between the UK and south Asian countries,” said Wainwright. The UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) was an important player in disrupting people smuggling rings, he added. Scotland Yard’s organised crime command confirmed it had a number of ongoing investigations into organised crime “in which the smuggling or trafficking of migrants to be exploited or coerced into committing crime is a feature”.
Where the intensifying crisis will end no one seems sure. Human rights advocates are demanding Europe’s leaders create safe passages allowing refugees to bypass hazardous routes in the hands of smugglers. Yet in the absence of meaningful political agreement, individual states have introduced unilateral measures to deal with the issue.
In a continent where, a quarter of a century ago, walls came tumbling down at the close of the cold war, new barriers are being built. Hungary – the entry point to the EU and the borderless Schengen zone – is racing to finish a fence along its 175km border with Serbia to keep out the vehicles ferrying migrants to a new life. The 71 crammed inside the abandoned truck in Austria never made it, nameless victims of a trade in human misery that shows no sign of slowing.
The Guardian