Raids in Germany and France: GSG9 in action against smugglers

At 6 a.m. the heavily armed elite police officers from the anti-terrorist unit GSG9 struck!

In Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Grevenbroich, Bochum and other cities, the special units stormed several apartment buildings, warehouses and an asylum home. Spectacular Europe-wide Raid against an unscrupulous network of criminal human smugglers!

Raids in Germany and France

The officers arrive at the same time before dawn France and Germany too, alone in North Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Württemberg More than 500 federal police officers are on duty. In addition, over 20 investigators from the French and English security authorities as well as investigators from EUROPOL are traveling in Germany, and a total of more than ten European arrest warrants are to be executed.

In Gelsenkirchen you can see French investigators from the Police National and Gendarmerie. In Essen, an asylum seeker accommodation is surrounded and searched. Suspects are said to live here too.

Iraqi smuggling network in the sights of investigators

The long-prepared attack involves an Iraqi smuggling network that smuggles illegal migrants into European countries on a large scale. The investigation is particularly concerned with spectacular smuggling of refugees with rubber boats across the English Channel, which is why France is leading the investigation.

On these often nighttime boat trips, the lives of illegal migrants from the Middle East and Africa are carelessly put at risk.

The Federal Police, together with Belgian and French authorities, have already struck against these organized gangs on several occasionsbut new groups of smugglers keep forming.

Investigator: “The perpetrators don’t care about the lives of migrants”

An investigator: “In some cases there is more money to be made with this than with international drug smuggling. Individual Syrians pay up to 10,000 euros for smuggling. A full inflatable boat can quickly cost several hundred thousand euros! And the perpetrators don’t care about the lives of migrants!”

In 2023 alone there were 7,924 cases of smuggling, an increase of over 60 percent compared to 2022. This is the highest number of people smuggling since the peak of the refugee crisis in 2016! The Federal Police and the Federal Criminal Police Office is investigating over 4,400 suspects; 90 percent of the accused smugglers are foreigners. As with today’s raid.

Tens of thousands of unauthorized entries into Germany

Up to and including October 2024, 71,181 unauthorized entries into Germany have already been detected. In 2023 as a whole there were even 127,549! Since federal police officers began carrying out stationary border controls again (from September 16 to December 1, 2024), 12,728 unauthorized entries have been detected.

8,451 people were immediately stopped at the border because of illegal border crossing. These included 411 people who were banned from re-entering Germany, and 300 smugglers were also temporarily arrested by investigators.

Consistent action against smugglers is required

Heiko Teggatz (51), chairman of the Federal Police Union, told BILD: “It is so important right now that we take consistent action against these smuggling organizations. The new hostilities in Syria are currently making the situation worse, hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees could again seek their way to Germany and we will then experience a second 2015.”

And further: “Criminal smugglers are just waiting for this. This must not happen again under any circumstances, Germany cannot cope with it.”