A group currently on trial at the Liège Magistrates’ Court for human trafficking transported an average of more than 22 persons per day for three years, counsel for the Myria Federal Migration Centre charged on Monday.
Two men are suspected of being the masterminds of the criminal organisation, which recruited people in Belgium through a WhatsApp group to work as drivers to pick up migrants on the ‘Balkan route,’ one of the main migration routes in Europe.
“It was a despicable trafficking operation,” said Jean-Pierre Jacques, lawyer for Myria, which has joined the case as a civil party. The institution is claiming moral damages of €1 in this case.
The lawyer described the criminal organisation as a machine that used threats and violence to instil fear, “a trap into which a series of vulnerable people fell, but the real victims are the migrants,” Mr. Jacques said.
The special feature of this international network was that it recruited vulnerable people to act as drivers. If the transport operation failed, they were left to their fate and sentenced abroad.
The migrants were transported in inhumane conditions. One person died in a road accident and another was kidnapped.
“In the hierarchy, there were the principals, the recruiters and the drivers. The winner was the principal, who took no risks and received the money,” Mr Jacques said.
The lawyer also pointed out the scale of the organisation which, he said, transported an average of 23 migrants per day for three years, between May 2019 and June 2022.
