European authorities announced on Wednesday that they had detained a Chinese trafficking organization that had smuggled Chinese nationals into Italy using luxury vehicles before seizing their visas and treating them like slaves.
The smugglers had the migrants pose as “unsuspecting Eastern citizens, properly- dressed, with much luggage, travelling in effective and cheap cars, driven by Foreign citizens who had lived in Italy for years and spoke Italian”, police said in a statement.
A Chinese national was stopped at the border between Italy and Slovenia in April during regular balances, and it was discovered that four illegal Chinese were being transported.
A sensor uncovered” the existence of a consistent, steady flow of unusual Chinese people who, in small parties, were flown to the outside Western territories in countries ( mainly Serbia ) where they entered with a card exemption”, the statement said.
” And then, from that, they were accompanied by vehicles, through Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia, up to the European state border”, it said.
Seized migrants were transported to a hideout close to Venice where they spent one or two days residing before being transported either to Italy or another European Union nations like France and Spain.
The traffickers at the safehouse confiscated their passports, and the statement read, “from then on, they were exposed to extreme oppression until the debts incurred for the trip had been repaid,” according to the statement.
The workers were kept “without any chance of a free or semi- free living, without medical help, with nothing except a bed and a place to work indefinitely”, authorities said, describing it as a sort of” slavery”.
During the operation, police detained nine alleged prostitution community members and identified 77 undocumented workers, “many of whom were women and some adolescents between the ages of 15 and 18 .”
