Authorities in Thessaloniki dismantled a gang that was smuggling undocumented immigrants for a fee.

Specifically, yesterday morning during a police operation in Thessaloniki and Athens (with the assistance of the Attica Aliens Directorate), Bulgaria, and the Netherlands, six foreign nationals, aged 25 to 47, and a 21-year-old Greek national were arrested, including the 44-year-old leader of the organization, pursuant to relevant national and European arrest warrants issued by the Thessaloniki Public Prosecutor’s Office for the Court of First Instance and the Court of Appeals, respectively.

Three additional members of the organization—foreign nationals aged 23, 26, and 36, are already being held in detention facilities throughout Greece for similar offenses committed as part of this organization’s activities, while the other three are wanted.

According to the police, the months-long investigation revealed the involvement of a total of 13 individuals against whom charges have been filed, for criminal organization and the transportation and smuggling of undocumented foreign nationals within the country for profit, an act that posed a risk to life – and the smuggling of undocumented migrants from within the country to another EU member state.

How they operated

As for its modus operandi, the organization smuggled undocumented foreign nationals from the Greek-Turkish border in Evros to Thessaloniki using vehicles originating mainly from Bulgaria, as well as vehicles stolen in Greece, using foreign nationals who were not permanent residents of Greece as drivers, but who entered the country for the sole purpose of completing the route, in order to make it more difficult to track them down and link them to the ringleaders.

Next, they concealed the people they were smuggling, offering them temporary shelter in rented or controlled apartments within the urban complex of Thessaloniki, and subsequently loaded and concealed the foreign nationalsin the cargo areas of international transport trucks in order to smuggle them into other European Union countries, posing an immediate and serious risk to their physical safety and lives.

They charged between 2,000 and 6,500 euros for transporting each foreign national

As established, from February 2026 to the present, he carried out at least twelve such transport operations, charging between 2,000 and 6,500 euros for transporting each foreign national, with the estimated illegal financial gain exceeding 300,000 euros.

As part of the coordinated operation, searches were conducted at 10 residences in Thessaloniki, Athens, and Sofia, where two private vehicles, numerous telephones and electronic devices, and a large number of documents (passports, International Protection Applicant Forms) belonging to other individuals, the sum of 980 euros, and two security cameras, which one of the arrested individuals used to monitor the exterior of the apartment building where he lived, as a counter-surveillance measure.

The investigation was conducted by officers from the Immigration Management Division of the Thessaloniki Aliens Directorate, in cooperation with the General Directorate of Border Police/the Bulgarian Internal Border Illegal Immigration Control Division, the Directorate for Combating Organized Crime/Department for Combating Illegal Migration of Romania, the Criminal Investigation Directorate of the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee/Ministry of Defense of the Netherlands, the European Center Against Migrant Smuggling (E.C.A.M.S.) of EUROPOL, as well as with the support of the Southeast European Law Enforcement Center (SELEC).

Source: Cnn.gr