Almost exactly a year ago, the man got behind the wheel himself. At the border control station on the A 93 near Kiefersfelden, he accelerated and tried to escape, which took him around 40 kilometers to a side street in Aschau im Chiemgau – sometimes at more than 200 kilometers per hour, although not only four illegal migrants from Turkey were with him were sitting in the car with him, but two more were hidden in the back of the trunk. In November 2022, the federal police reported on this escape, which led, among other things, through a ditch and a construction site barrier, and at the end of which the officers had to incapacitate the man with pepper spray in order to be able to arrest him.
Now the Traunstein public prosecutor’s office has brought charges against the 33-year-old Azerbaijani – not just because of this one smuggling trip, but because they consider him to be the main organizer of more than 20 individual smuggling trips with a total of more than 400 people smuggled.
Accordingly, the man is said to have planned to smuggle in all of these migrants in individual stages from Hungary to Germany and, among other things, provided the mostly Turkish citizens with train tickets and bus tickets as well as sleeping places. In the end, they were brought to Germany mainly from Austria via the Inntal motorway and the A 8 from Salzburg, and from the Czech Republic via the A 17 towards Dresden.
According to the Traunstein prosecutors, the 33-year-old is said to have received at least 400 euros per person – with amounts between 6,500 and 8,000 euros that the smuggling organization demanded for and from each individual smuggled person. The gang earned around 3.2 million euros from more than 400 people being trafficked. According to prosecutors, this is also the reason why they smuggled in the largest possible groups, sometimes more than 30 migrants, at once. This corresponds to the police’s observations that there have recently been more and more so-called large-scale smuggling cases.
The traces initially led to Eastern Europe
The investigations against the 33-year-old were carried out by the special department set up in Traunstein in 2018 to combat cross-border and organized crime. The Free State has now expanded this so-called “Traunstein model” to several other public prosecutor’s offices. In this specific case, the Traunsteiners said they initially followed traces that led to Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic or Slovakia, and discovered cross-connections to the other smugglers. The fact that the investigators are not only catching the drivers as the last link in the chain, but also a mastermind is more the exception than the rule.
They are now accusing the suspect of not only gang and commercial smuggling of foreigners, but also a forbidden motor vehicle race because of the dangerous escape. They consider the bite on the hand of a federal police officer during the arrest to be a physical attack on law enforcement officers and intentional bodily harm. They want to confiscate 160,000 euros from the man’s smuggling business, as well as his high-powered SUV and his driver’s license. The Traunstein Regional Court must now decide whether to admit the charges.