The Croatian police in June participated in an international operation against human trafficking which involved 33 countries, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex), Europol and Interpol, and in which 134 people were arrested.
During the operation, the Croatian police conducted a total of 64,468 checks of people and checked 21,319 vehicles, 25 vessels and 35,312 personal documents at 1,017 locations, while no victims of human trafficking were identified.
However, the operation, organized by the European Multidisciplinary Platform to Combat Crime (EMPACT), saw 134 arrests, including 29 for trafficking for sexual exploitation and four for labor exploitation.
The Police Directorate added that 226 forged documents were found and that 64 people suspected of human trafficking were identified. In addition, 134 potential victims were registered, including 15 minors, and 104 criminal cases were initiated.
The police said the operation targeted migration movements towards the European Union at all types of borders, as well as secondary and further movements through Europe.
The Police Directorate said that the participants of the operation, including European, Western Balkan and North African countries, analysed forms of these crimes that are dominant in their countries. It emphasized the importance of the presence of representatives of the Ukrainian national police and its migration service at the Coordination Centre established by Frontex in Warsaw.
The operation involved 22,000 officers from 33 countries and they checked more than 970,000 people, hundreds of homes, commercial facilities, hotels, buses, railway stations, ferry ports, airports and border crossings.
The Police Directorate emphasized that the timing of the operation is particularly important since more than seven million people have fled Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian aggression, most of them being women and children.
“The huge number of people fleeing the country makes people vulnerable to exploitation by criminal groups, and unaccompanied children are particularly vulnerable. Criminal networks could exploit this crisis for sexual, labor or other types of exploitation,” a press release said.
Europol recently reported that human trafficking has long been a lucrative business for criminal networks that rely on a broad and dynamic infrastructure already established and expanded across the European Union, with Eastern Europe being the main region of origin for victims of this crime.
