An Austrian court sentenced a 37 years old Romanian citizen to 3 years in prison for “human trafficking in particularly bad conditions," reports Le Figaro.

The man was held in July near Vienna after the police found no less than 42 immigrants crowded in his van, on a surface of six square meters, at a temperature of 30 degrees Celsius. The investigation showed that the migrants were taken from Hungary and had spent seven hours without a break under these conditions. The immigrants were from Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq.

The Romanian said that he was promised EUR 1,500 for transporting the immigrants, but that he didn’t know exactly how many people he was carrying.

The court in Korneuburg near Vienna convicted the Romanian to prison for “human trafficking in particularly bad conditions” and “participation in a criminal organization."

Thousands of refugees from the Middle East have been trying to get to Western Europe this year, running from the war at home. This has led to a flourishing business: refugee smuggling. Criminal networks have been making millions of euros illegally carrying refugees. Immigrants would pay thousands of euros each to get to Austria and Germany, enduring inhumane conditions, which even led to tragedies.

At the end of August, 71 dead refugees were found in an abandoned truck on a motorway in Austria. The investigators found that they had suffocated. In a separate incident, in Hungary, 10 Syrian refugees were injured when a van driven by a Romanian suspected of human trafficking overturned en route for Budapest.

Hungarian authorities have detained several hundred human smugglers this year, many of them Romanians.

Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com