A big surprise awaited a police unit inspecting a three-car carrier trailer with newly manufactured cars on the Czech-Polish border after they discovered young men from Afghanistan traveling in one of the transported vehicles. Two migrants were also found hidden in the same manner elsewhere in the Olomouc region of Czechia.
In the first incident, patrol officers inspected a convoy of trucks heading for Poland on the D1 motorway in Bohumín. The driver himself alerted the patrol to the passengers.
“One of the drivers told the police that he suspected that he saw two people in one of the new cars transported in the semi-trailer of the other colleague,” said police spokeswoman Soňa Štětínská.
The foreigners got out of the car during a subsequent inspection.
“The couple did not have a travel document or permission to move freely in Czechia. It was a 23-year-old man and a 16-year-old from Afghanistan. The adult male was placed in the Facility for the Detention of Foreigners in Vyšné Lhoty, and concerning the age of the younger one, the Department of Social and Legal Protection of Children was contacted and took over,” the spokeswoman added.
On Tuesday, police officers dealt with a similar case in the parking lot of the D35 motorway from Olomouc to Ostrava. Two people jumped out of a loaded semi-trailer while the officers were inspecting a truck carrying new vehicles.
“The driver stated that he was transporting vehicles from Romania to Poland. He did not know that the foreigners had boarded the transported vehicle. The foreigners stated that they were migrants from Afghanistan and submitted Romanian asylum-seeker documents,” said police spokesman Libor Hejtman.
Police also found migrants in the Strakonice region. Police there suspect that a 49-year-old truck driver had brought six Afghan migrants from Romania to Vodňany in the Strakonice region on Tuesday. The migrants were discovered by a service dog.
“The truck driver came to the building of a company in Vodňany to unload the cargo. The moment he stopped and began to take the canvas off the trailer, a group of young men jumped out of the hold of his truck and fled. They headed for the company’s gatehouse, then to the back of the building, where they climbed the fence and ran towards the main road,“ described Jaromíra Nováková, a spokeswoman for the Strakonice police.
The police caught them with the help of a tracking dog. None of the young men had valid documents that would entitle them to stay in the Czech Republic. Police suspect the driver of organizing and allowing illegal crossing of the state border, and he now faces up to eight years in prison.
Title image: Police inspection (Police of the Czech Republic)
