Rival people-smugglers from Afghanistan, Morocco and Syria are arming themselves in northern Serbia to devastating effect, often with weapons supplied by Albanian crime gangs from Albania, Kosovo and southern Serbia, revealed BIRN.
It was early morning, July 2, 2022, when the forest of Makova sedmica, a sleepy settlement just short of Serbia’s northern border with Hungary, became a battlefield. The clatter of automatic weapons sent refugees and migrants fleeing, bullets whistling through the trees around them. The epilogue: one dead, seven wounded, including a 16-year-old girl; some of the victims were collateral damage in a war between rival people-smuggling gangs, both with roots in Afghanistan, reported BIRN.
“This isn’t happening anywhere [else] on the Balkan route – only in Serbia is it like this, smugglers firing from Kalashnikovs,” a Syrian smuggler told BIRN in February this year.
His words weren’t far off the mark. Over the past year, reports of armed clashes between gangs making huge sums of money from spiriting refugees and migrants over Serbia’s borders into the European Union (EU) have become more frequent, reported the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.
And larger settlements than Makova sedmica are not spared. In November last year, a gunfight broke out between Moroccans and Afghans in the very centre of the border town of Horgos, wounding six. Video of the clash showed armed men running past the local elementary school. In June and July this year, in armed clashes between gangs, one Afghan person was killed while five people were wounded.
Previous reporting by BIRN has exposed the collusion between such gangs and corrupt police officers. Now, a new investigation reveals the extent of their weapons arsenals, and where they came from.
For more than six months, BIRN monitored the activities of people-smuggling gangs in Serbia, verifying information in real-time and maintaining constant contact with more than a dozen independent sources, including those in the smuggling networks, the police, security services, their informants and collaborators, employees in migrant camps, taxi drivers involved in smuggling, rights activists and experts in the field.
Evidence gathered from hours of collated audio, photo and video material, verified by independent sources in the police, intelligence and smuggling networks, indicate that the chief suppliers of the pistols and Kalashnikovs used by such gangs are Albanian criminal groups, including that of the Xhemshiti twins, Amir and Amar, from the Kosovo capital, Pristina, who have already run foul of the law.
One photo seen by BIRN even shows Amir Xhemshiti posing with members of the Moroccan ‘Tetwani’ people-smuggling gang operating out of Horgos, all of them clutching Kalashnikovs. BIRN has identified them as members of the Tetwani gang by consulting several independent sources as well as by visually comparing an abundance of earlier photos.
Reached by BIRN, Amir Xhemshiti denied any involvement in the smuggling of weapons or people in northern Serbia.
The photo with the Tetwani gang came about when he tried to enter the EU illegally, he said, like every “other Albanian with a lot of hardship and concerns”. The Moroccans, however, caught him.
“After they caught me I gave them some money; I saw they had guns and I asked them if we could take a picture together,” he said. “I don’t have any kind of relationship with them at all.”
Despite the dangers posed by such armed groups, the Serbian police appear helpless – or unwilling – to disarm them, reported BIRN.
According to BIRN sources, on May 24 this year, members of the ‘400/59’ Afghan gang filmed themselves on the roofs of border police jeeps in a forest near the northern Serbian city of Subotica, posting the pictures on TikTok and Instagram. Border officers were inside a tent at the time, talking to the gang leaders and taking a cut of their profits, according to audio recordings obtained by BIRN secretly-made by a source with access to smugglers.
The police came and took the money, one member is heard saying. Police did not respond to BIRN questions concerning the incident.
BIRN is also in possession of recordings of calls and WhatsApp correspondence between Afghan smugglers and a trusted go-between who served as a mediator between the police and the smuggling gangs after the July 2 gunfight in Makova sedmica. The go-between offers them immunity and to continue their activities in exchange for handing in their weapons. The deal never fully came to fruition and the clashes continued.
“They [smugglers] are smart,” said one smuggler, who opposes the use of weapons. “They give the police a few Kalashnikovs, pistols, but they have many more. And they can always buy more from Albanians.”
Fatjona Mejdini, director of the SEE Observatory of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, GI-TOC, told BIRN that the situation in northern Serbia, with the presence of armed smuggling groups, is dangerous and should be addressed more effectively by Serbian authorities.
“I believe that corruption within Serbia’s police might help smugglers in obtaining arms and facilitate their operations,” said Mejdini.
“The smugglers are fighting for a market that has significantly expanded since 2022, and which continues to grow each day. Thus, the conflict between them has intensified and could further escalate. In this type of illegal business, arms are something that goes with it.”
Read the full BIRN article here.