The Debrecen District Court sentenced two defendants who wanted to smuggle 31 migrants into a truck in Western Europe to a final custodial sentence.
Dénes Dobó, a spokesman for the Debrecen Tribunal, wrote in a statement to MTI on Thursday that his 54-year-old Turkish man and girlfriend, a 41-year-old Romanian citizen, had pleaded guilty to the crime and had waived his right to a trial.
The trial court found the defendants guilty of human trafficking, which the first-degree defendant committed as a member of a criminal organization. Therefore, the district court sentenced the man to two years in prison and expelled him from Hungary for four years, sentenced his partner to two months in prison, and expelled him from the country for two years to four months, the spokesman said.
According to the verdict, the first defendant met in September 2020 with members of a criminal organization in Istanbul involved in the smuggling of migrants from Turkey to Western Europe. It was agreed that the first-time defendant would handle the truck with a new truck.
In the autumn of 2020, the Turkish man took the truck to Western Europe via Romania for official transport, picking up his girlfriend, the second-degree defendant in the case, on her way to help him.
They traveled the roads in the consignment note, the consignments were unloaded, and headed back to Romania. They were still in Germany when the first-degree defendant was called by a Turkish acquaintance to go to Hungary because he would receive a new shipment there.
Arriving in Hungary, the driver was informed by telephone that this time migrants would have to be transported. It was then that the second-degree defendant became aware that the truck would henceforth be used for human trafficking.
The defendants traveled by truck around midnight on January 14, 2021, in the Kokad area of Hajdú-Bihar County, to pick up 31 people who had crossed the Romanian-Hungarian border illegally and declared themselves Syrian citizens and transported them to the vicinity of Budapest and then to Western Europe.
The migrants, led by an unknown human smuggler, crossed the green border on foot and waited 24 hours for the truck in a nearby forest.
The defendants made a few miles with the truck when the patrols of the Border Police Brigade in László stopped the vehicle. Police arrested the man and his girlfriend for a well-founded suspicion of committing a crime and took him along with 31 migrants to the border police post, according to a court statement.
MTI
