Serbian gang smuggled 2,000 refugees into Austria

Five suspected people smugglers are on trial in Korneuburg, Lower Austria - accused of bringing around 2,000 migrants and refugees into Austria between February and September 2015.

Published: 11 February 2016 12:55 CET

Serbian gang smuggled 2,000 refugees into Austria

Migrants crammed into a people smuggler's van. File photo: Police

The defendants, three men and two women who are all originally from Serbia, are said to have made three trips a week across the Austrian border, with 40 people smuggled into the back of vehicles.

A 60-year-old Serbian woman with Austrian citizenship and her 43-year-old partner are believed to be the gang’s leaders. They charged each refugee between €250 and €300, and paid the drivers of their vehicles just €200 or €250 for each trip, according to prosecutors.

Overall the group cashed in €375,000, prosecutor Bianca Schöndorfer said. Two Serbian men aged 36 and 50 drove the vehicles, and afterwards stayed with the Serbian woman and her boyfriend’s mother in their Vienna apartments.

Between May and mid-September last year, they are believed to have transported 1,500 refugees across the border. Schöndorfer said that in order to “maximise their profits” the group increased their trips to three times a week, driving several vehicles in convoy with up to 40 people in the back – some of the vehicles were dangerously overcrowded.

The drivers were told not to stop during the journey and the refugees were not given any food or water. They were kept in “awful conditions for long periods of time” and weren’t allowed to stop for toilet breaks, Schöndorfer said.

One of the vehicles was a Renault Espace which had some of the seats removed and into which 14 people were crammed and made to lie on top of each other.

One witness told prosecutors that a refugee almost suffocated during the journey due to smoke from a faulty engine coming into the car.

The smugglers face between one and ten years in prison. The 43-year-old ringleader already has a criminal record and is likely to get a tougher sentence of up to 15 years.

His 60-year-old girlfriend said she wanted nothing to do with the smuggling and had only grudgingly agreed that the drivers could stay with her. Her boyfriend has already pled guilty to some of the charges and said that he needed the money to get medical treatment for a lung condition, as he does not have health insurance and that he also paid for his parents house in Serbia to be renovated.

His 59-year-old mother is one of the accused, and has admitted to providing overnight accommodation for the drivers and registering them at her apartment in Vienna.

The gang was busted on September 11th when several members were arrested. All five of the accused have been in prison awaiting trial for the past five months.

With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.