Austria smashes human-trafficking ring
Austrian authorities today said they have smashed a major human trafficking ring allegedly led by Romanian, Moldovan and Ukrainian criminals who smuggled more than 5,000 eastern Europeans to the west in the past few years.
Austria’s Federal Criminal Investigations Office said it arrested 64 suspects in a large-scale police operation that began last June and focused on the alpine country’s border checkpoints.
Officials said the traffickers charged €3,900 to immigrants trying to enter the European Union illegally, and that thousands were successfully smuggled into Austria, many in small, cramped hiding places such as false floors built into vehicles.
Some of the immigrants were forced to squeeze their bodies into hiding spaces that measured less than eight inches high – barely enough room to let them breathe – Major Gerald Tatzgern of the Federal Criminal Investigations Office said.
“Only because of police intervention were many victims able to escape asphyxiation,” he said, suggesting some immigrants may have been near death when authorities searching vehicles at Austria’s borders found and rescued them.
Tatzgern said 59 of the suspects were arrested in Austria, and that the rest were taken into police custody in Hungary, Poland and Romania, including a German and a Romanian intercepted at a checkpoint on the border with Germany and Poland.
He said Austria, Italy and Spain were the immigrants’ main destinations.
“We still want to intensively question the ringleaders,” he said.
Investigators said those involved in the trafficking ring used brute force at times to intimidate the immigrants, and that rape was committed in some cases. They did not elaborate.
Some of the immigrants obtained the cash for their passage through loans from gangs involved in large-scale household burglaries, police said. Others were forced to work for the gangs, Tatzgern said.
The police operation also involved officers from Austria’s border authority and from the eastern province of Burgenland, which has borders with Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia, officials said.
Tatzgern said it was the first time his office had co-operated with authorities in Moldova “and it functioned excellently”. He said the sweep was dubbed “Operation Nistru” for the river that forms part of Moldova’s border with Ukraine.
The impoverished former Soviet republic is a major source of illegal immigration. Many of the victims are young women who end up in forced prostitution.
Tatzgern said the network also was involved in other criminal activities such as illicit drug and cigarette smuggling, the fencing of stolen goods and the counterfeiting of euro bank notes.
