BERLIN —
Police in five
European countries on Tuesday launched a major crackdown on
people-smuggling, making a string of arrests, German authorities said.
اضافة اعلان
Officers staged
dawn raids in Belgium, Britain, France, the
Netherlands, and Germany, said
police in the northwestern German city of Osnabrueck, considered a hub for the
traffickers.
Some 900 police
were deployed in
Germany alone, carrying out searches of 36 sites and arresting
18 suspects in an operation coordinated by Europol and EU judicial agency
Eurojust, they said in a statement.
A police
spokesman declined to provide further details but French judicial sources said
the ringleaders were believed to be based in Iraq, Afghanistan and Eritrea.
Germany’s Der
Spiegel magazine reported that the operation targeted organized groups taking
migrants to England.
It quoted
Osnabrueck police as saying that the network had smuggled up to 10,000 people
via the Channel in the last 12 to 18 months in a highly lucrative scheme.
Iraqi-Kurdish
suspects were targeted in Osnabrueck, with several warehouses and private
addresses being searched.
Special forces
were deployed because the suspects were believed to be “armed and dangerous”,
Der Spiegel reported.
The coordinated
action with Britain comes amid growing tensions between London and the EU
following Brexit. Ties are particularly strained with France over migration.
Now Britain has
left the
EU, it no longer has a migrant returns treaty with the 27-nation bloc.
Britain has
repeatedly accused the French authorities of not doing enough to stop the
crossings.
Despite promises of
more cooperation, the number of migrants seeking to cross the Channel from
France to England surged in the first half of this year, according to the
French interior ministry.
From January 1 to
June 13, there were 777 attempted crossings involving 20,132 people, up 68
percent on the same period last year, it said.
In a
controversial policy, the UK is planning to deport illegal migrants, including
those who arrive across the Channel, to Rwanda under an agreement with the
African nation.
However, the
first flight last month was cancelled after a last-minute intervention by the
Strasbourg-based
European Court of Human Rights, a decision which enraged
London.
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