Dutch trucker caught with 47 undocumented migrants convicted of people smuggling

The court sentenced a Dutch truck driver to four years in prison, six months of which conditionally suspended, for trying to smuggle 47 people onto the ferry to England. The 33-year-old man from Gemert-Bakel was convicted of people smuggling. The sentence is equal to what the Public Prosecution Service (OM) had recommended.

The Dutch authorities caught the man in Hoek van Holland on December 5 last year when sniffer dogs alerted to the suspect’s truck at the border crossing point for the ferry to England. When Koninklijke Marechaussee officers searched the truck, they found 47 men, women, and children hiding in the trailer among vintage cars. They were from Iraq, Turkey, Vietnam, and Albania, among others.

The truck’s tarpaulin had no cuts and was closed with hooks only reachable from outside. The Marechaussee, a policing force that’s part of the Dutch military and is responsible for border security, accused the driver of people smuggling. The man also confessed to that during interrogation, saying he received 45,000 to get these people to the U.K., the OM said.

During the trial, the prosecutor called people smuggling a “reprehensible crime,” pointing out that these people were trapped in the truck with no protection against its cargo and no way out.

In 2019, 39 Vietnamese people suffocated to death in the back of a refrigerated truck that had traveled from Zeebrugge to the United Kingdom by ferry.