Human traffickers, perhaps one of the most dangerous groups operating in Europe today have struck again with a group of young people walking home from a music festival run down by a smuggler’s car trying to outrun police.
Police attempted to perform an inspection of a vehicle in Bavaria which resulted in a high speed chase. During the driver’s attempt to get away from police, the vehicle drifted in an attempted turn and hit a group of young people walking home from a music and fireworks festival in Vilshofen. The six injured pedestrians were aged between 21 and 11 years old and were all hospitalised, and two police officers were injured. Four of the young people were seriously injured but there were no fatalities yet, reports German broadsheet Die Welt.
The driver did not stop at the scene of the collision and continued in his attempt to escape. Eventually, the vehicle got stuck in a dead end and the driver, a 24-year-old migrant male from Georgia in the Caucasus, West Asia, was arrested. Also inside the vehicle were eight migrants, none of whom had legal travel documents.
Police are working on the assumption the Georgian driver is a people smuggler and the eight passengers were his customers. The investigation continues.
The incident is only the latest in a great series of such attempts by people smugglers driving illegals across Europe attempting to outrun the police, many of which have had deadly consequences, both for their passengers and for other road users. In 2023 seven people including a child were killed when a trafficker crashed his minivan while trying to outrun the police.
The small truck had seats for nine people but was carrying 23, and was travelling at over 100 miles per hour when it rolled at a junction in southern Germany. The same year another such crash in Hungary killed one and seriously injured several. The year before three were killed and 11 injured in a grossly overloaded smuggler car in southern Hungary after running a police checkpoint. The vehicle burst into flames after crashing.
In other cases, the traffickers kill through sheer neglect. In 2021, two migrants died of asphyxiation in the back of a van being driven through Europe by a smuggler, who knew they had been sealed in the back for hours without fresh air. In an even more infamous case in 2015, 71 migrants died in the back of a trafficker’s truck in Austria after the vehicle had been abandoned by the smugglers but not unlocked.
These dreadful events pale in comparison to the death tolls of traffickers at sea, taking advantage of Europe’s weak border control policies to make enormous amounts of money, but killing thousands of people in recent years in the process.