Italian police say they disrupted migrant smuggling ring, 15 Egyptians arrested

By Emilio Parodi

MILAN (Reuters) - Italian police said on Tuesday they had dismantled a migrant smuggling network, leading to the arrests in several countries of 15 Egyptians involved in using sailboats for dangerous illegal sea crossings from Turkey to Greece and Italy.

According to an Italian police statement, the network facilitated the illegal entry into Italy of at least 3,000 migrants since 2021, earning more than $30 million by charging them $10,000 each.

The Italian police said the arrests were made simultaneously in multiple countries with the cooperation of Albanian, German, Turkish and Omani police, coordinated by Italian anti-mafia prosecutors in Sicily and relying on Interpol and Europol.

The smuggling network had been led by an Egyptian who ran operations from Istanbul, the Italian police said.

"The organisation had set up a system that involved recruiting professional skippers, almost all Egyptian, providing logistical support in Turkey while the migrants waited to leave, and transporting them in sailboats to the Greek and Italian coasts," Italian police said in a statement.

Crossings departing from the Turkish ports of Bodrum, Izmir and Marmari took up to a week, with dozens of migrants crammed on board 12-15 metre sailboats with no life-saving equipment, the statement said.

Tens of thousands of migrants are believed to have died trying to cross the Mediterranean in recent years. The sea route from Turkey to Italy has been particularly notorious since February 2023, when at least 94 people died off Cutro in southern Italy in one of the worst disasters of the crisis.

(Reporting by Emilio Parodi; Editing by Alvise Armellini and Peter Graff)