German police have charged the driver of a van which crashed in Germany on Friday, killing seven migrants. Prosecutors filed charges against the suspect for migrant smuggling and causing death through dangerous driving.
In the early hours of Friday (October 13), a van transporting 22 migrants crashed on the A94 motorway in Bavaria. Late on Saturday (October 14), police issued charges for the driver of the van who is suspected of smuggling the migrants into Germany and causing death by dangerous driving.
Among the seven dead, German authorities have reported the death of a six-year-old child. Some of the other 15 traveling in the van also sustained serious injuries in the accident. The driver of the van, who himself sustained injuries in the crash, is believed to be a 24-year-old stateless man residing in Austria, according to the German news agency dpa.
Prosecutors accuse the man of trying to conceal the fact that he was transporting migrants in his van, and attempting to evade police controls. The crash happened after he fled from the controls at a speed of 180 kilometers per hour.
Wolfgang Beckstein, the state prosecutor in Traunstein, Bavaria, where the crash took place, said that the charges come amidst a noticeable increase in migrant smuggling cases in Germany, and an increasing ruthlessness in how the smugglers are prepared to act.
Beckstein, as reported by the French news agency Agence France Presse (AFP), also noted that more and more German citizens also seem to be involved in the smuggling of migrants.
According to German police, the small van, in which the migrants were traveling, originated in Austria. It drove at a high speed through the police control and overturned soon after. The charges include smuggling migrants from abroad, causing death by dangerous driving and attempted murder in 15 other cases, as well as a range of “other crimes,” reported AFP. The van shouldn’t have been carrying more than nine people, say German police.
The van crashed, police say, after trying to escape a police check at 180 kilometers per hour | Photo: Sven Hoppe / dpa / picture alliance
The majority of those in the van came from Syria and Turkey, state German prosecutors. Beckstein told AFP that in the first three quarters of 2022 German police came across 393 smuggling cases. In the first three quarters of this year, the number has already risen to 500. Beckstein described “almost daily cases,” reported the news agency.
‘We are trying to crack down on the smugglers’
The number of suspects accused of smuggling people from abroad has increased from 2,132 cases in 2021, to 2728 in 2022. Figures available for 2023 end in August, and include 1,683 cases, reports AFP.
The majority of suspects involved in smuggling are of Syrian nationality, but in 2022, one in five suspects also held German nationality. Another growing group of suspects, according to AFP, are individuals from Turkey.
“We are trying to crack down on the smugglers and all those who support them. We want to protect people’s lives and stop criminals committing these kinds of crimes,” Beckstein told dpa. The prosecutor said they would be trying to investigate who lay behind the smuggling suspects they have already captured and rounding them up too.
“We come across these kinds of cases almost daily,” Beckstein stated. “In which 15 to 20 people are crammed into small vans with no kind of safety protection. The criminals are becoming ever more inhumane and ruthless.”
Source: InfroMigrants