GUANGZHOU: Guangdong police have reportedly busted a massive people smuggling operation that earned 220 million yuan (HK$266 million) from getting 3,200 people out of the country.
The investigation was the biggest crackdown of its kind in the country over the past decade, mainland media said.
Citing Guangdong provincial public security authorities, Guangzhou Daily reported yesterday that security officials in Jiangmen arrested 22 suspects and found more than 35,000 forged visas and 270 counterfeit official seals.
As part of the crackdown, the authorities also froze bank accounts containing a total of 11 million yuan.
The authorities said they believed the syndicate, based in Guangdong and Fujian provinces, had smuggled 3,200 people from China to unidentified countries in North and South America.
“If the syndicate had not been taken down then, within two years, it would really have developed into a huge smuggling business specialising in the Americas,” the report quoted an unnamed police officer as saying.
The syndicate’s kingpin, identified only by his surname of Li, reportedly specialised in forging documents, and allegedly ran a travel firm in Shenzhen, which he used as a front for the syndicate’s operations.
More than 70 per cent of the illegal migrants smuggled by the syndicate into the Americas were young men in their 20s looking for work.
Jiangmen has been a source of Chinese migrants for more than a century.
The police crackdown took place after Shenzhen border control officials intercepted a bag in February last year, which led to the detention of one suspected syndicate member, and 12 migrants allegedly in possession of counterfeit visas for an unidentified South American country.
An investigation by Jiangmen public security officials over the next five months led to the arrest of other suspected syndicate members.
The Guangzhou Daily report did not say how long the syndicate had been operating, or how much it charged people to be smuggled to the Americas.
Following a tip-off that there would be a smuggling training session at a Shenzhen hotel, police launched coordinated raids in July last year in 25 different locations, including Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Jiangmen and Beijing.
The operation resulted in the arrest of 198 suspects and the seizure of 35 vehicles.
In 2013, Spanish and French police broke up a human smuggling ring that charged each Chinese migrant up to €50,000 (HK$410,000) to reach Europe and the United States.
The two-year investigation led to the arrest of 75 suspects – 51 in Spain and the others in France.
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