With the UN calculating that 50,000 migrants — legitimate refugees and illegal immigrants — entering Greece in July 2015 alone, compared with 47,000 in all of 2014, smugglers are finding new and lucrative ways of trafficking people into the crisis-plagued country — presumably a first stop until more affluent “pastures” of northern Europe are reached.
A recently uncovered “VIP migrant smuggling” service involved a Turkish man who used a jet ski to ferry one or two passenger a time from the opposite Turkish coast to the island of Lesvos in the eastern Aegean, at a rate of… 2,000 euros per head!
The human trafficker’s “sea taxi service”, however, was interrupted when coast guard authorities were tipped off about his daily “trips” from Turkey to the Greek island, with five to six trips a day alleged.
His luck ran out in the early morning hours of Wednesday when cornered by coast guard personnel on a deserted Lesvos beach, and after he had dropped off his “passengers”.
The suspect abandoned the water craft and disappeared into the island’s interior, taking advantage of nightfall. However, he was finally arrested before dawn with by coast guard commandos employing infrared cameras.
Crisis on Greek-fYRoM border
Meanwhile, on the broader migrant crisis front, hundreds of migrants had congregated on the border post on the border between Greece and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (fYRoM) on Wednesday, waiting for an opportunity to continue northwards out of Greece, with a final destination somewhere in western or northern Europe.
Hundreds of legitimate refugees, identified as Syrian nationals, also gathered at the bus station in Kavala, northern Greece, also awaiting transport to the Greek-fYRoM frontier after being off-loaded by a ferry boat that brought them from the islands of Limnos and Lesvos.
Moreover, in yet another instance of mismanagement, a ferry boat carrying a total of 3,000 migrants that was initially set to dock in Thessaloniki was later shifted to Piraeus. The vessel, “Eleftherios Venizelos”, was carrying migrants off the island of Kos.
Tasia with Turkish envoy
In an earlier development, embattled Alternate Minister for Migration Policy Tasia Christodoulopoulou, who has attracted increased criticism and ridicule for the government’s handling of the problem, on Tuesday met with Turkish ambassador to Greece Kerim Uras.
A more-or-less “generic” press release referred to “cooperation” and dealing with problems jointly. Turkey is the main mustering point and jump-off spot for various groups of migrants, refugees and would-be economic immigrants trying to enter the EU from the east.
