Twenty-four refugees, abandoned on Christmas Day on the steppes of Siberia, have been found wandering in nearby Kazakhstan carrying a corpse. The refugees, all of them citizens of Sri Lanka, were victims of an unscrupulous trafficker, and thought they were in Germany.
The group, men aged between 20 and 39, were flown from Sri Lanka to Dubai on the Persian Gulf and then to Omsk in Siberia where they were locked in a house for 20 days. According to one survivor who spoke English they were put in a truck by a "businessman" and driven around for five hours until they were disorientated and then told they were in Germany.
They were ordered to start walking and to avoid police checkpoints. After four days wandering on the steppes where temperatures in the past week ranged from minus 15 to minus 20 degrees the group strayed into Kazakhstan near the northern frontier town of Pavlodar.
During the four-day walk a man (20) died from exposure. The steppes of Siberia and Kazakhstan form an exposed plain thousands of miles long.
Finding themselves 3,000 miles from their destination with the earth frozen so hard they were unable to bury their dead colleague, the men were finally spotted by Kazakh border guards and taken to Pavlodar.
Police in Pavlodar told the Russian news agency Interfax that five of the men had no documentation and the others had visa pages torn from their Sri Lankan passports. None of them appeared to hold Russian visas, which are issued as separate documents and not stamped on passports.
International trafficking of refugees and asylum-seekers has become a big business internationally for criminal organisations.
On June 18th, 58 refugees from the Fujian province in eastern China were found suffocated in a truck at the English port of Dover. Last month 26 Chinese refugees, also from Fuji, were arrested in Hong Kong after being discovered in a container bound for the US. The refugees had paid $50,000 each to members of an international smuggling gang.
In a separate development yesterday two British subjects were sentenced to prison in France for trying to smuggle 28 illegal immigrants from Turkey into Britain.
Nicholas Clarke (27), a security guard, and Ronald Duberry (34), unemployed, were given sentences of 15 and six months' imprisonment respectively at their trial in Boulogne.
On Tuesday a 35-year-old London woman was sentenced to three months in prison for trying to smuggle two Pakistanis into Britain in the boot of her car. Ms Sheena Tuckfield, who is four months pregnant, denied the charges.
