Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Global web blamed in 71 deaths
LONDON — The smugglers responsible for driving 71 migrants to their deaths in the back of a cramped, unventilated truck in Austria were part of an international syndicate that has been a subject of multiple criminal investigations, a European law enforcement official said Saturday.
So far, four relatively low-level operatives have been arrested in connection with the deaths, which were discovered Thursday when authorities pried open the door to an abandoned truck emitting a noxious odor on the main highway between Budapest, Hungary, and Vienna.
The preliminary arrests will be in place until the suspects are indicted Sept. 29, at the latest, said Ferenc Bicskei, president of the Kecskemet Court.
Rob Wainwright, director of Europol, said his organization and national law enforcement agencies were “working urgently” to catch the ringleaders of an operation that epitomizes the rapid expansion and increasing sophistication of human-smuggling networks across the continent.
“It was a direct hit in our systems,” said Wainwright, whose agency serves as the law enforcement arm of the 28- member European Union. “We were able to make intelligence connections with many other cases that we’re currently working on across Europe.”
The gruesome nature of the deaths has drawn sharp attention to the smugglers who have become instrumental and much- loathed players in the migrant crisis that is unfolding across Europe.
From European capitals to the White House, leaders in recent days have called for a fresh crackdown on the networks that have enabled more than 300,000 people to reach the continent this year, while also leading at least 2,600 more to their deaths.
But the smugglers are becoming harder to combat as their operations become more agile, more international and more innovative in their use of new tools such as social media, Wainwright said.
The exponentially growing scale, too, has proved a difficult impediment for police and intelligence services.
That growth was on display Saturday in the southeastern Hungarian town of Kecskemet, where the four detained suspects went before a judge, who granted a prosecutor’s request to extend their detention.
The court agreed with prosecutors that the severity of the crime and the risk that the suspects would flee justified the detention. Bicskei said the four suspects appealed the decision, saying they had not committed any crimes.
Those arrested included a Bulgarian of Lebanese descent believed to be the truck’s owner. Two other Bulgarians and an Afghan also were taken into custody, Hungarian police said. The suspects’ identities have not been revealed. The four range in age from 28 to 50.
The four men appeared at a closed judicial session Saturday after being led into the courthouse with their hands shackled. One smiled faintly as cameras flashed.
The defense lawyers for the suspects were not present and will be notified of the court decisions, court spokesman Szabolcs Sarkozy said.
A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, Gabor Schmidt, said the truck, which was registered in Kecskemet, began its journey in the Hungarian town an hour’s drive from Budapest and picked up the migrants after driving south toward the Serbian border. It then reversed and headed north through Hungary before passing into Austria.
Schmidt said the men likely would face smuggling charges that could yield sentences of up to 16 years. Austrian authorities are seeking the suspects’ extradition as part of a homicide investigation.
Bicskei said the court has seen a surge this year from three or four cases of migrant smuggling a month to 25 or 30. The increase has been mirrored across Hungary, where police officials say 827 cases have been registered this year, compared with 593 in all of last year.
The discovery of the truck Thursday was followed only hours later by another tragedy 2,000 miles away, where at least 117 people drowned when a boat, unprepared for the rigors of a voyage across the Mediterranean, capsized soon after it left Libya.
Thus far, 198 people have been rescued, and the search is ongoing for missing passengers from two boats that capsized Thursday off the western coastal city of Zuwara with about 500 people onboard, a rescue team said in a statement.
Another Libyan accused of organizing the crossing was arrested Friday, raising the total to three, a security official said.
TOLL AT 2,600
The deaths added to a toll of at least 2,600 people who have lost their lives this year while seeking sanctuary in Europe. As the details of the recent deaths emerged, officials and rights advocates demanded that the continent’s leaders create safe passages that would allow refugees to bypass treacherous journeys in the hands of unscrupulous smugglers.
In a statement, issued late Friday from United Nations headquarters in New York, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was “horrified and heartbroken” by the deaths of scores of migrants on land and at sea in recent days.
He called for governments to offer “comprehensive responses, expand safe and legal channels of migration and act with humanity, compassion and in accordance with their international obligations.”
“This is a human tragedy that requires a determined collective political response,” he said. “It is a crisis of solidarity, not a crisis of numbers.”
The call added to an emerging chorus of pleas for action on signs that at least some European leaders are prepared to push for fundamental change. Yet it remained unclear whether those efforts would succeed given the deep divisions that remain among national governments in the European Union, which works on the basis of consensus.
The dead in Austria included four children, the youngest just a year old. It remained unclear why the migrants, at least some of whom were believed to have been fleeing the war in Syria, were left to suffocate.
“The solution is not to increase border controls but to open more legal ways to Europe,” Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said at a news conference in the town of Eisenstadt, near the highway where authorities on Thursday discovered the truck.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose government has in recent days called for unified European asylum policies, said there were “intense efforts on a European level so this issue can be dealt with better than we are able to do now.”
But there was also deep skepticism that European leaders would reach agreement after months of indecision and bitter recrimination over who should bear the burdens of the war-, povertyand oppression-driven exodus from the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.
Earlier tragedies have come and gone with little coherent action as well as an ever- growing disparity between the countries that have welcomed tens of thousands of asylum-seekers and those that have spurned efforts to settle hundreds. Several eastern European nations, as well as Spain and Britain, have proved resistant to any attempt to impose Europe-wide quotas for accepting refugees.
“I’d say that something major would have to happen. But something major already has happened,” said Neil Quilliam, who leads the Middle East and North Africa program at the London-based think tank Chatham House. “It’s hard to see what it will take to actually change the policy.”
The refugee crisis that has roiled Europe this year has myriad causes, and rights advocates acknowledge that there are no easy solutions. But migration experts say the crisis could be mitigated by policies that expand access to visas for those from conflict-ridden countries and allow asylum-seekers to apply from their home regions, rather than waiting until they have risked their lives on treks across thousands of miles of land and sea.
“People use smugglers because they lack safe and legal alternatives to get into the European Union,” said Katerina Kratzmann, head of the International Organization for Migration’s Austria office. “Migration itself is not the problem. It’s just reflecting what’s happening in the world right now. But the system we have in the EU doesn’t match that situation.”
In a separate case, Austrian police said that they stopped a truck Friday near Braunau, on the German border, with 26 people from Syria, Afghanistan and Bangladesh crammed inside.
They said Saturday that three severely dehydrated small children were among the passengers and were taken to a hospital.
“According to doctors, they would not have withstood this ordeal for very much longer,” police official David Furtner told the Austria Press Agency. The suspected smuggler, a 29-year-old Romanian man, was arrested.
Also Saturday, a teenage migrant was found dead with a gunshot wound on a yacht approaching a Greek island after smugglers clashed with Greece’s coast guard, authorities said.
The Greek authorities had previously said the teenager had been found suffocated on the yacht. It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the discrepancy in accounts.
Greek coast guard forces and a Latvian patrol boat belonging to Frontex, the European border management force, stopped a yacht for inspection off the Greek island of Simi, close to the Turkish coast, the coast guard said in a statement.
It said the yacht tried to evade inspection and repeatedly tried to ram the patrol boat. A Greek coast guard officer was injured during a scuffle with one of the traffickers, who tried to grab his gun.
“During the clash with the traffickers, gunshots were fired,” the statement said, adding that a doctor at a health center in Simi later informed the coast guard that “the death of the 17-year-old foreign national was probably caused by a gunshot.”
The yacht containing some 70 migrants was towed to Simi and the traffickers were arrested. They told the coast guard they were Turkish citizens.
A coast guard spokesman in Athens said she had nothing to add to the statement and that a new one would be released today. She said the nationality of the victim was unknown.