Tractor report 2020: more arrests despite the corona crisis – Coronavirus Vienna

This stems from the 2020 tractor report, which Interior Minister Karl Nehammer (ÖVP) presented on Thursday in Vienna. However, the perpetrators have changed the modes of operation and the advertising methods used to reach their customers. This is how health care is advertised to potentially dragged people.

In 2020, 21,641 residents or illegally entered were arrested in Austria. Compared to 2019, this was an increase of around twelve percent. It was also around 400 more than in 2018, but still significantly less than in the years 2012 to 2017 with the peak in 2015, when more than 94,000 people were illegally detained in Austria. With 4,842 people towed, the number almost doubled in 2019 (2,469), and with 311 registered traffickers, 69 more than in 2019. “Austria is one of the EU countries most affected by illegal immigration,” Nehammer said.

According to the Minister of the Interior, a relatively recent fact is that Austria is also considered the first “rich” country in the Western Balkans and has therefore increasingly become a target country. Therefore, the Western Balkan states have a very central strategic task as an ally of Austria in the fight against illegal immigration.

Due to restrictions on passenger traffic from the previous year, smugglers would soon have changed their ways and means of smuggling people illegally across borders, said Gerald Tatzgern, head of the central office to combat the crime of smuggling. The automobile, formerly a popular means of transportation, the tractor, was out of order. “They switched to freight very quickly.” An example of this came just two days ago when a truck loaded with rolls of paper was killed in an accident and many others were injured.

Truckers don’t always know they have refugees in their vehicles. Tatzgern described the trailer’s roof tarps being opened at rest stops and smugglers maneuvering their victims inside.

The sums that traffickers charge their clients are very different: Tatzgern reported trailers of 200 to 300 euros, but also around 2,000 to 3,000 euros. It depends, for example, on whether refugees can cross the border between Serbia and Hungary through a tunnel or by using ladders thrown over the border fence. It is also a question of price whether one or two stairs are made available to the refugees. In the most expensive variant, they can climb the fence on one ladder and go back down the other. With the cheap one, they have to climb a ladder and then jump four to five meters down the other side, which often leads to serious injuries, especially to children.

The coronavirus pandemic also helped smugglers recruit their victims. Medical care in the target countries was promoted to them and the possibility of vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 was promised.

Nehammer emphasized that smuggling is a branch of organized crime. Last year, the perpetrators came from Syria (60), Austria (37), Iraq (28), Romania (22) and Turkey (18). Smugglers from these states made up more than half, the rest were distributed to other states. 91 percent of the smugglers were men, more than 60 percent between the ages of 21 and 40.

Tatzgern noted that the pandemic also had an impact on human trafficking, which is about the exploitation of people. “Due to restrictions to contain the pandemic, there was more and more illegal prostitution in hotels and apartments, since sexual service providers were not officially allowed to practice their profession,” said the investigator of the Federal Criminal Police Office ( BK). He feared that the labor force could be further exploited, especially with the towage of stranded people, so that they could de facto earn wages for further transport.