Attentive soldiers – “taxi drivers” in Burgenland exposed as smugglers

Such missions used to be commonplace, but are now rare. Last week, 17 refugees were arrested in Burgenland. 29 had been reported in the past seven days. There have been 135 migrants so far this year. This means that the number of registrations is limited.

Suspicious car
The first arrest of smugglers this year took place only in Nikitsch. A pedestrian saw a suspicious car with distinctive license plates on Quellenstrasse. The passerby immediately called the police. Officers were able to stop the car shortly afterwards. The Syrian behind the wheel posed as a taxi driver who would pick up a family at Sopron.

Questionable information
But his navigation system had wrongly sent him to Nikitsch, the 38-year-old claimed. The questionable information quickly turned out to be false. Soldiers discovered and picked up four refugees wandering through the border town. According to the migrants’ reports, the Syrian ‘tax driver’ from Vienna-Liesing was their smuggler. The coordinated criminal service in Oberpullendorf took over the further investigation.

Huge decline
With a few exceptions, there is currently calm at the border. “Contrary to international trends, the number of arrests in this country is declining sharply. Within a year it fell by more than 95 percent,” the Ministry of the Interior said.

Thanks to even better network cooperation between the countries, hundreds of suspected smugglers have already been taken out of circulation in the Western Balkans and Turkey.