Greek police made more than 16 arrests in a single week for smuggling migrants inside passenger cars, according to the H...

Greek police made more than 16 arrests in a single week for smuggling migrants inside passenger cars, according to the Hellenic Police website. Most suspects used private vehicles, not trucks, to move people who had crossed the Greek-Turkish border without documents. The latest arrest came Monday, July 28, when a 22-year-old refused to stop for a vehicle check on the Old National Road between Kavala and Thessaloniki. Officers found three migrants hidden inside, two of them stuffed in the luggage compartment, all without travel documents and reportedly heading toward Thessaloniki. On Saturday, July 25, police arrested three more suspects, including one Greek national, for transporting roughly 17 people across two private cars. Across all 16 cases this week, the pattern was the same: passenger vehicles, not commercial trucks, being used to move people through northern Greece. The arrests come after a separate Europol operation on July 16 that netted seven suspects across three countries, five of them in Greece, one in Bulgaria, and one in the Netherlands. That network allegedly smuggled migrants through the Balkans using rented, stolen, and fraudulently registered cars. Frontex data show the Western Balkans is the single busiest land route for irregular migration into the EU, with movements through Serbia accounting for 74 percent of all detected illegal land-border crossings. Criminal networks behind these operations are increasingly decentralized, with key figures based outside the EU specifically to avoid arrest, according to the latest Europol report. Europol describes the networks as "more agile and better connected than ever," able to sustain operations even after repeated arrests by splitting route management among different actors and laundering profits digitally across borders. #Greece #Immigration #BorderSecurity