BERLIN: German and Turkish police said they have cracked down on an international smuggler ring in one of the biggest raids on human trafficking networks in recent years.
German federal police claimed five arrests and their Turkish counterparts 10, in raids which took place simultaneously across both countries in the early morning. The vast majority of those arrested were identified as Syrian, officials said.
The 15 detainees are believed to have participated in the smuggling of 1766 migrants on beaten-up boats across the Mediterranean. Germany’s police chief, Dieter Romann, said the smugglers earned an estimated $9.5 million through their network of “ghost ships.”
The traffickers charged migrants—most of whom are believed to have fled from Syria—between $4,500 and $6,000 per trip. Before reaching the shore, the smugglers jumped off the boats, leaving the migrants on their own in often dangerous situations, police officials said.
“This had nothing to do with altruistic helping, it was purely about cashing in,” said Mr. Romann.
In Germany, some 490 police officers, including special antiterror squads, swooped in on suspects across six different states in cities including Berlin, Cologne and Hannover. At the same time in Turkey, police led raids in cities including Istanbul and Mersin.
The joint raid is the first coordinated crackdown by the two countries on an international smuggling network. The two countries began investigating jointly back in December 2014 in an operation code-named “Wave.”
“Together, we succeeded [in landing] an important strike against ruthless smugglers of ghost ships,” said Mr. Romann.
Record levels of migration over recent months have sparked the emergence of new criminal networks smuggling people from Turkey into Europe, in a business European security officials have valued at billions of dollars.
Longtime criminal networks, best-known for smuggling guns and drugs, have shape-shifted across Europe to take advantage of the record number of people looking for ways to leave war-torn Syria and beyond.
The expansion of smuggling activity has created an additional headache for European governments already divided on how to respond to the migrant crisis. Thousands of migrants have died in attempts to cross the Mediterranean and politicians including German Chancellor Angela Merkel have pledged that cracking down on smugglers is one crucial element in trying to get the migrant tide under control.
Following raid, German and Turkish officials said they would continue to work together in the future.
“The transcendence of crime across borders necessitates bilateral and multinational cooperation,“ said Mehmet Lekesiz, the head of the Turkish national police who attended a news conference in Potsdam, near Berlin here the other day.
