Bulgaria’s Deputy Interior Minister: Number of Human Smugglers Went Up in 2014
Domestic | June 23, 2015, Tuesday // 11:00| viewsBulgaria's Deputy Interior Minister Tsvyatko Georgiev, photo by BGNES
Bulgaria’s Deputy Interior Minister Tsvyatko Georgiev has drawn attention to an increase in the number of human smugglers in 2014.
Speaking Tuesday at an international conference on the cooperation between the mechanisms for the protection of human smuggling victims and the asylum provision mechanisms, Georgiev pointed out that the increased migratory pressure accelerated human smuggling via Bulgaria.
Georgiev, as cited by the BGNES news agency, assured that the Interior Ministry was working actively to combat human smuggling and to prevent it, adding that there were special entities at the Interior tasked with detecting crime groups involved in human smuggling and money laundering.
He argued Bulgaria, an external border of the EU, had been exposed to serious risk of mixed migration flows over the past few years.
Georgiev suggested that Bulgaria was gradually becoming a country that was attracting migration.
As a deterrent to migratory pressure he cited the fence at the Bulgarian-Turkish border, stressing that it was using up substantial financial, human and technical resources.
He said that a total of 65 special police operations had been conducted in Bulgaria since the beginning of 2015 to uncover illegally residing foreign nationals.
Back