The target was Austria – the smugglers’ war escalated: three migrants were shot

“It looks like war!” Residents of the Serbian village of Horgoš on the border with Hungary were shocked when shots were fired in the forest. Smugglers armed with Kalashnikov AK-47s and migrants clashed. The wild gunfight could be heard everywhere. A dispute is said to have escalated in an abandoned farm building where refugees are briefly housed on their way to Europe.

Three migrants shot dead
According to insider information, Afghan smugglers shot three migrants on their way to Austria because they did not follow mafia orders. “Afghans and Syrians have long taken over the organization of the rival smuggling gangs and are pulling the strings,” officials report. “Former migrants are now smugglers. Those killed in Horgoš could also have been smugglers,” say those familiar with the situation.

The fatal incident caused a lot of commotion. Hungarian television does not shy away from criticizing the Serbian police, who “cannot do anything against the smuggling mafia”. Serbia’s response to the reprimand: soldiers must guard the border fence with Hungary in the future.

New “double tang” technology for the tractors
Austria is not immune to the unscrupulousness and brutality of the smuggling gangs. As reported, the mafia is using the “double pincer” as a new trick: during illegal journeys from Hungary to Burgenland, smugglers with fully occupied vans now cross the border at two border crossings almost simultaneously. The police chase and stop one transport, the other gets through. Their accomplices can attest to how strongly the mafia adheres to this method. “‘Give full throttle and race across the border!’ I was instructed to do this by my human trafficker boss when I called on my mobile phone: “Woe, I wouldn’t have lasted,” says a 36-year-old smuggler from Iraq.

At the wheel of a white van, he drove for six hours through Hungary with 35 refugees he had welcomed at the Serbian-Hungarian border. On the orders of the ‘boss’ he crossed the border with Austria in Deutschkreutz. Pursuit, arrest! This is causing great concern among many residents of communities near the border in Burgenland. “Tugboats race through our city at 100 km/h. “How long do we want to wait until something bad happens?” they say.

“Migration pressure remains very high”
The main route of the smuggling organizations to Central Europe still runs via Serbia and Hungary. “Migration pressure on the Balkan route remains very high, despite the decreasing number of apprehensions in Austria. This is the breeding ground on which the smuggling networks operate,” the domestic authorities must admit. And tens of thousands of people outside Europe are still waiting to escape.

‘Colleague was murdered in cold blood’
Because a migrant on the odyssey to us did not want to be crammed into a box truck with 46 others, he had to die. The “Krone” published the dramatic minutes of Anas T. some time ago. Then and now the stories are just as disturbing: after fleeing Syria, the father of the family was taken to the Hungarian-Serbian border in 2021.

Shocking scenes took place there when the smugglers wanted to take the refugees across the Danube in a rubber boat early in the morning: ‘A handsome Moroccan initially refused to get on the boat, but he was even more upset that he then had to get into the boat steps. with dozens of people crammed into a box truck,” describes T. The smugglers knocked the North African to the ground, pulled out a gun and shot him. The dead man was left there like trash and the escape continued – until the car had a blowout shortly before Styria and Anas T. were rescued.