The Nidwalden cantonal police were able to free the migrants from a completely overcrowded van. Insight into an unscrupulous business.
The Nidwalden cantonal police were able to free 23 people from the hold.
The refugees are crowded in the back of a white van when the police spot them early Monday morning. The 23 men from Afghanistan, India, Syria and Bangladesh have already waited several hours without a break – in just five square meters, without a window.
According to a report from the Nidwalden cantonal police, the vehicle with an Italian license plate was noticed during a heavy traffic check at 6:30 a.m. on Autobahn 2 near Buochs. The patrol followed the vehicle and finally stopped it at the exit in Hergiswil.
Transport under life-threatening conditions
The case provides insight into an unscrupulous business: the smuggling of refugees and migrants. For sometimes horrendous sums, the criminals smuggle people across Europe in search of a better life, often under inhumane conditions.
People smuggling has repeatedly led to tragedies in recent years. Like in August 2015, when 71 refugees suffocated in a refrigerated truck in Austria. Or as in October 2019, when 39 bodies were found in the back of a truck east of London; the dead were men and women from Vietnam.
Fighting people smuggling is proving difficult, also in Switzerland. In a report published a few years ago, the Federal Office of Police stated that the measures taken against the criminals were inadequate. The small number of cases identified is an indication that the phenomenon is not given enough priority. Although the authorities have upgraded in the meantime, the criminals still know how to exploit the gaps in the system.
Exhausted but unharmed
Senad Sakic is the head of the Nidwalden criminal police. Regarding the successful action in Hergiswil, he says: “It was a mixture of experience and instinct that led to the control.” But there was also a bit of luck involved, because the delivery van did not show any major abnormalities.
The 23 refugees were all freed from the van unharmed. “But they were exhausted and battered by the deprived journey under unworthy conditions,” says Senad Sakic. That’s why the rescue service was called in and the men between the ages of 20 and 50 were looked after and cared for on site.
The first surveys took place on Monday. This information gives an approximate picture of how the smugglers transported the refugees through Europe. Accordingly, some of the men had been taken from Romania to Italy, while others had been in the neighboring country for some time. They were picked up at the train station in Milan by a member of the smuggler network and driven to the Swiss-Italian border region, where the white van was waiting for them.
23 refugees crammed into a van: Swiss investigators have never seen anything like this before. But people smugglers keep getting caught in this country too.
Recently, for example, at the border crossing in Thayngen, Schaffhausen. Customs employees freed two completely dehydrated refugees from Afghanistan from a truck there. The 18 and 30-year-olds drew attention to themselves with knocking noises and had to be looked after by paramedics on site. The truck driver, a 30-year-old Serb, was temporarily arrested but later released.
Driver claims to have known nothing
The suspected trafficker in the Nidwalden case, a 27-year-old Gambian resident in Italy, has been arrested. In the first interview, he denied being part of a criminal gang of people smugglers. The Gambian said he was unaware that there were fugitives locked in the back of the van.
The man’s job: He was to drive the car from the Italian-Swiss border region to Basel and hand the vehicle over to another driver there. This would then have traveled on to France with his human cargo.
The investigation will show how credible these statements are. The public prosecutor’s office in Nidwalden has opened proceedings against the man on suspicion of human smuggling.
Nine men apply for asylum
The investigators assume that the refugees should have been transported to neighboring European countries after transiting through Switzerland. After their rescue, the refugees were initially housed in a refugee shelter in Stansstad.
One thing is clear: most of the refugees will have to leave Switzerland again. The migration department of the canton of Nidwalden writes: “They are told that they have to leave Switzerland because they are staying here illegally.”
However, nine of the men exercised their right to apply for asylum in Switzerland. The Nidwalden authorities gave them a train ticket so that they could register at the Federal Asylum Center in Ticino.
However, the majority of the refugees stated that they were only passing through and did not want to stay in Switzerland. In her case, the Swiss Refugee Agency is demanding that the reasonableness and admissibility of a possible deportation to Italy and Romania be clarified in depth.
Where the men have to go in the end is still unclear. A check of their fingerprints showed that none of them had already been registered in another Schengen country, and they were not carrying any passports.