Europe tried to crack down on people smugglers. It only made them stronger

The pale yellow house, guarded by a grey gate, blends into the quiet street in one of Belgrade’s leafy neighbourhoods.

It was here in late May, however, that a migrant was allegedly stabbed to death and found in a pool of blood, witness accounts suggest.

“I’m scared,” a woman living next door tells The Telegraph. “There was a lot of blood.”

The following day, a shoot-out erupted between people smugglers and police further west in a town near Serbia’s border with Croatia, leaving one migrant dead.

Violence linked to organised immigration crime is on the rise in Serbia and countries along the Western Balkans route that migrants – aided by smugglers – take to travel to Western Europe, where many hope to be granted asylum.

“This is something that’s really escalating very, very quickly,” said Milica Svabic, a lawyer with KlikAktiv, a Belgrade-based NGO that provides legal and humanitarian assistance to migrants and refugees.

“Different smuggling groups are fighting over territory, over clients, over money.”

Experts say the spate of violence shows how Europe’s tighter border controls and anti-smuggling policies are backfiring. Rather than disrupting the gangs, the approach has strengthened the groups and made them more profitable, as migrants are more reliant than ever on smugglers to facilitate their journeys.

Smugglers based in Turkey who send people on this route have told The Telegraph that stronger border enforcement simply creates greater demand for their services – all they need to do is adapt their methods.

This is happening even as Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, and David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, continue their pledge to tackle illegal migration and “smash the gangs” by funding foreign law enforcement. They have prioritised the Balkans, visiting Serbia, Albania and Kosovo in recent months to boost co-operation to resolve the escalating immigration crisis.

Serbia is not part of the European Union, though the nation borders four countries in the bloc – Croatia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria – making it a geographic hotspot for irregular border crossings.

Scrutiny has grown over this route as it’s popular with Afghans and Syrians, the top two nationalities arriving in the UK via small boats last year, according to data from the United Nations and the British Government.

The “presence of Frontex [the EU’s border force] only increased the prices of smuggling and pushed people toward smugglers”, said Ms Svabic. “They turn to smugglers, and smugglers provide private accommodation, transportation – everything.”

Smugglers are charging exponential prices – up to €15,000 (£12,635) to transit from Turkey to Germany and France, with an additional few thousand to cross the English Channel onward to the UK’s shores.

A place to stay, as arranged by smugglers, costs about €11 a night, which comes on top of steep crossing costs.

That’s a far cry from prices in 2016, when smugglers charged a few hundred euros for each border crossing during the peak of the migration crisis, driven partly by Syria’s civil war.

At the time, migrants could cross on their own by using GPS and public transport, guided by relatives who had taken the same journeys earlier.

It was also easier to apply for asylum and stay in official camps, which allowed access to different services, protection and information.

However, neither are now possible. Many migrant reception centres have closed in transit countries, which have fallen under significant political pressure from the UK and EU to stem the flow of people. Serbia, for instance, has shut all but six camps.

And smuggling groups now control different sections of the border and won’t allow people to pass without paying.

Migrants must use smugglers for every step: a place to stay, transportation to border areas, crossing the border itself, as well as a way to move through the next country.

This makes them “invisible… [and] very vulnerable”, particularly if they’re hidden in private accommodation, said Ms Svabic. “Even a small fight, an incident with the smuggler, can end with a fatal outcome.”

This is what many fear may have happened in Surcin, the neighbourhood of Belgrade, where a dead migrant was discovered in a pool of blood in a flat that had been advertised online for short-term rentals, though police are still investigating.

The Telegraph encountered smugglers and migrants at one such hideout in the far outskirts of Belgrade, where smuggling-gang shootings have occurred as recently as April.

Migrants stay in the upper floors of a large multi-storey shop selling clothing and toys, run by Chinese immigrants who arrived about eight years ago.

Near the entrance, a sign written in Pashto – a language spoken in Afghanistan – reminded people not to loiter by the front.

Here, two Afghan teenagers, both 16, were sheltering and spoke in muted tones as a smuggler hovered nearby.

They’d escaped Afghanistan nearly three years ago after the Taliban returned to power, spending €9,500 in that time to travel more than 4,000 miles – much of it on foot – from home all the way to Serbia.

“That was not a bad price; some ‘games’ are now €8,000 to go from Afghanistan to Turkey,” said Mohammad, who declined to give his real name out of fear of retribution, and used slang to refer to irregular border crossings.

Both boys had a long stopover of about a year in Turkey, working odd jobs, including as shepherds, before moving onward to the north-west of the country, crossing on land into Bulgaria, walking in secret across the country over 15 days, before finally arriving in Serbia.

“We hope to get to Germany, but if we are caught before that and forced to register our fingerprints in another country in the EU, then we will try to go to the UK,” said Mohammad.

Brexit has made the UK more appealing for refugees as they cannot be sent back to other European countries under EU legislation.

With the growing power of people smugglers, some migrants and NGOs fear the violence they face will continue to intensify, further victimising them.

BWK, an Afghan gang operating in Serbia and Bosnia, has been kidnapping migrants at gunpoint and torturing them to demand ransoms of up to €10,000 from their families at home as a condition for release.

One BWK member was arrested last year on suspicion of being involved in the targeting of migrants. The case is ongoing, according to the prosecutor’s office in Bosnia.

The gang may extend to or have followers in the UK, as various social media posts with the BWK tag have cropped up online, including one showing a masked man standing atop a British police car.

Credit: TikTok/@bwk.afg.100

In the long run, it will become even more challenging to police the gangs, as smuggling operations move further underground to evade detection.

Smugglers working in this region, for instance, communicate over encrypted apps such as Signal and Telegram. They know the border areas well, too, noting where cameras, drones and dogs might be stationed.

They also “maintain distance from their customers via the use of intermediaries to avoid detection”, according to a report about the Western Balkans route by the Mixed Migration Centre (MMC), a research organisation.

The smugglers are sending smaller groups across on more covert routes – moving people only at night and getting over border fences with ladders, removing a section, or even digging underneath.

In some cases, they are forcing migrants into riskier options – hiding people in concealed compartments in vehicles, or making them take drugs to move faster to avoid being caught. Sometimes, migrants are being transported along with weapons and ammunition, according to the MMC’s findings.

The dangers of such clandestine crossings are evidenced by the many unmarked graves that dot Serbia’s borderlands, including in the sleepy town of Loznica, where many people have drowned in the fast-flowing Drina River demarcating much of the dividing line to Bosnia.

“NN,” read small wooden stakes in a local cemetery, to signify “nomen nescio”, Latin for “I do not know the name.” One marks the grave of an infant who died last year.

Controls on the Western Balkans route have been touted as a success – Frontex data show a 78 per cent drop in irregular crossings into the EU last year.

It’s clear, however, that the route remains active. Experts have highlighted that the data cannot capture full activity, as not all migrants will encounter the authorities and thus won’t be reflected in the numbers.

In addition, there are “increased incentives for governments in the region to underplay the arrival figures, as evidence that considerable investments in border security were working”.

Migrants, too, have indicated that they’ll continue transiting through the Balkans, as they have no option but to escape unstable situations at home of war, persecution and famine.

“Nobody enjoys being in a situation like this,” said Farid, 25, a former police officer, who was forced to flee after the government was ousted when the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan.

His feet were covered in cuts and bruises from weeks of travel, often on foot, all led by a smuggler.

“But I don’t have another choice, I have to go.”

Additional reporting by Javid Khan

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