Over the past few days, officers of the Serbian customs administration and the police have caught twenty migrants who tried to illegally enter Croatia at border crossings Šid and Batrovci.
According to a statement issued by the Serbian customs representatives, they prevented 15 Afghan nationals and 5 Pakistani nationals from illegally crossing the border. They were discovered in trailers of eight trucks which were on their way to member states of the European Union. Eighteen migrants were caught at the smaller Šid border crossing, while two migrants were apprehended at Batrovci, which is the main border crossing between Croatia and Serbia.
All the migrants were trying to cross the border in a similar way, hiding in trucks. They entered the trucks and hid in them while drivers were at rest areas near the border. In several cases, drivers themselves reported to authorities that they suspected someone was hiding in the trailers, because they could hear voices coming from that area or have noticed marks on the trailers that someone had tried to break in.
All the apprehended migrants were young men between ages of 11 and 30. Customs officers and policemen discovered them hiding among boxes of sanitary supplies, pallets of laminated furniture, among car parts, rolls of duct tape and cardboard boxes, and some were even found in a trailer full of sugar.
Most of the trucks in which they were hiding were on their way to Italy, one was going to Germany, and there were some which were carrying goods to Croatia and Slovenia.
A few days ago, nine Turkish nationals, including three children, were smuggled across the border between Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Split-Dalmatia Police Department reported that that two smugglers were caught and arrested, while the migrants were taken to a centre for asylum seekers.