Human traffickers now use aircraft to smuggle Iraqi migrants to Italy

Till now, human traffickers used to ferry migrants in boats or follow the land route but, now, they have gone in for aircraft. Police have arrested six members of a trafficking network that charged up to £6,000 to fly Iraqis to Italy - the arrests were made as they prepared a plane for seven migrants.
This has been reported in dailymail.co.uk dated 18 March 2016.

A gang of four Greeks and two Iraqis were involved in this smuggling and the police nabbed them when four children were due to take off on the flight - it happened in western Greece. This smuggling network has already successfully taken 12 groups of migrants from Iraq to Italy. Each of the migrants had paid the smugglers between 4,500 and 7,500 euros (£3,515-£5,858).
The police officers seized the Piper small aircraft, 34,430 euros (£26,500) in cash, two cars, 700 grams of cannabis and shotgun cartridges during the raid in Messolonghi. The criminal network used for illegally transferring the migrants from Greece to countries in western Europe on small aircraft has since been dismantled.
It is not clear just how the migrants had arrived in Greece but the smugglers had driven them to the west of the country from Athens where the plane was due to depart from. The migrant children have been sent to a juvenile welfare centre but, the fate of the adults was not clear.
Italian officials have revealed that there had been a spike in migration due to the good weather and ships had picked up 3,100 migrants over the past three days most of them are Lybians. The breakdown is - 712 migrants were picked up yesterday and, another 2,400 had landed in the two previous days, all grouped in small, flimsy rubber dinghies.


Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org

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