Chinese migrants smuggled into Italy in luxury cars, police say

Rome - Italian police said on June 26 that they have busted a Chinese trafficking network which used luxury cars to smuggle Chinese migrants into Italy before confiscating their passports and treating them like slaves.

The smugglers had the migrants pose as “unsuspecting Asian citizens, well dressed, with little luggage, travelling in powerful and expensive cars, driven by Chinese citizens who had lived in Italy for years and spoke Italian”, the police said in a statement.

Investigators were alerted to a possible ring after a Chinese citizen was stopped at the border between Italy and Slovenia in April during routine checks, and found to be transporting four undocumented Chinese nationals.

A probe uncovered “the existence of a consistent, continuous flow of irregular Chinese citizens who, in small groups, were flown to the external European borders in countries (mainly Serbia) where they entered with a visa exemption”, the statement said.

“And then, from there, they were accompanied by car, through Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia, up to the Italian state border,” it said.

Smuggled migrants were transported to a safe house near Venice, where they stayed for a day or two before being taken either to areas of Italy or other European Union countries like France and Spain.

The traffickers confiscated their passports at the safe house and “from then on... (they) were exposed to severe exploitation until the debt incurred for the journey had been repaid”, the statement said.

The migrants were kept “without any possibility of a free or semi-free life, without medical assistance, with nothing except a bed and a place to work indefinitely”, the police said, describing it as a sort of “slavery”.

The police arrested nine alleged members of the trafficking network during the operation and identified 77 undocumented migrants, “many of them women and some minors aged between 15 and 18”. AFP