Human traffickers charging €10k per head to transport illegal migrants into Europe on luxury yachts

New reports have claimed that human traffickers are charging 10,000 euros per head to smuggle illegal migrants from Turkey into Europe on luxury yachts.

According to investigators, the majority of the people who run these kinds of ‘first-class’ smuggling operations are from Eastern European countries like Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Belarus. The smugglers generally traffic ‘well-educated’ migrants from Iran, Iraq, Syrian, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, Italy’s Il Giornale reports.

Boats typically leave from Anatolia in Turkey, make their way through the Ionian sea, and offload the migrants somewhere along Italy’s southeast coast, most often in the province of Crotone. Italian authorities have also reported such landings in southern regions such as Calabria 

During September, 15 of these ‘first-class’ landings were recorded by investigators in Calabria. 

Luxury yachts have long been utilized to smuggle drugs, as they often fly under the radar of authorities. The phenomenon of using them to smuggle people, however, is a relatively new – but not an entirely unheard of – practice. 

In 2017, the Times reported on multimillion-euro networks run by Ukrainian smugglers which employ luxury yachts to ferry migrants from Turkey to southern Europe.

The same year, reports from the German daily newspaper Die Welt asserted that human traffickers from Morocco were offering migrants so-called ‘all-inclusive’ luxury smuggling packages to reach the Spanish mainland. 

Last year in Greece, authorities arrested a group of human traffickers believed to be a part of an organized crime ring responsible for smuggling illegal migrants into Greece from Turkey in luxury cars and limousines, Greece’s daily newspaper Ekathimerini reported.

Since Matteo Salvini and his populist League party were ousted from Italy’s government earlier this year, the country has seen an uptick in the number of migrant arrivals. Italy’s new leftist-globalist government has effectively undone Salvini’s border control policies, opening the country’s ports yet again to 3rd world migrants and their NGO enablers.