The German and Turkish police on Wednesday announced major coordinated raids against a criminal trafficking network that used unseaworthy ships to send more than 1,700 refugees to Europe.
The operation was a major strike against international organised crime fuelling the record migrant wave to Europe, police chiefs from both countries told a press conference at Potsdam outside Berlin.
In 17 pre-dawn raids, more than 490 German police officers and commandos arrested five suspects across six German states, said federal police chief Dieter Romann.
Similar raids took place in Turkish cities including Istanbul, Ankara and Mersin, where 30 arrests were made, Turkish national police chief Mehmet Lekesiz told the joint press conference.
The human traffickers allegedly bought three old and decrepit cargo ships in Turkey, loaded each with hundreds of paying migrants and sent the vessels on autopilot toward the Italian coast.
Taking up to $6,000 (5,500 euros) from each of the more than 1,700 people, the traffickers acted “not out of an altruistic desire to aid escapes but simply to make money,” said Mr Romann.
The three dangerous voyages across the Mediterranean allegedly netted the traffickers an estimated $9.5 million, the police chiefs said.
Meanwhile, support for Chancellor Angela Merkel and her conservative bloc has slipped further due to her handling of the refugee crisis and worries about crime andsecurity after assaults on women at New Year in Cologne, a pollshowed on Wednesday.
Ms Merkel’s open-door refugee policy, and her insistence that Germany can cope with last year’s influx of 1.1 million migrants and more this year, has strained local authorities and split her right-left coalition.
Mass sexual attacks on women in Cologne and other German cities at New Year which have been largely blamed on migrants have deepened public scepticism about Ms Merkel’s policy.
Separately, migrant hotspot Austria said Wednesday it would seek to cap the number of asylum-seekers at 37,500 in 2016, less than half of the 90,000 claims received last year.
“We can’t take in all asylum-seekers in Austria,” Chancellor Werner Faymann said after a national asylum summit in Vienna.
The government plans to limit total claims to “about 130,000” over the next four years, on top of those filed in 2015. “We have fixed this number as a guideline... We will study what happens when this limit is reached,” Mr Faymann noted. The four-year cap, which represents 1.5 per cent of Austria’s 8.5 million population, was an “emergency solution” serving as a “wake-up call for the EU”, he said. The move is a further sign that the government is hardening its stance in Europe’s worst refugee crisis since 1945.
