People-Smugglers Accused of Leaving Dead Migrant to Rot in Albanian Wilderness

People-smugglers have been accused of abandoning a Bangladeshi migrant the Albanian wilderness where he died of a “brain stroke” while trying to enter the European Union illegally on the Balkan migrant route.

The body of 30-year-old Tapash Sarkar was left in a hilly region near Albania’s border with Montenegro, according to his brother Sumon Sarkar, who said that Tapash died while walking in the summer heat for several days.

Mr Sarkar was part of a group of around 30 migrants, along with people-smugglers, travelling from Greece across the Balkan route to Western Europe, where he hoped to eventually reach France, his brother told the European Union-funded website InfoMigrants.

“We recently paid €2,000 to Bangladeshi smugglers who were supposed to take my brother to France. Another €1,000 was promised once he reached the destination,” Sumon Sarkar stated.

He told me that he would earn good money after reaching France, which would help our family to grow. We are in debt at the moment.”

Journalist Pradip Kumar Sarkar said that migrants who travelled with Tapash when he died told him that the smugglers had simply left his body in the wilderness.

“When he died, the smugglers left him on the hill. Two of his friends made a short video of the dead body and sent it to his relatives before leaving the area,” he said.

Tapash Sarkar is just the latest migrant to be led to their death by people-smugglers this year, and is one of the thousands of others who have died while trying to reach the European Union illegally.

While exact estimates of deaths vary, in May the International Organization for Migration (IOM) claimed that around 600 people had died in the first few months of this year trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, while over 3,000 were estimated to have died at sea overall in 2021.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.