A total of 130 illegal migrants, attempting to reach Western European states through the territory of the Czech Republic, have been detained in the Czech Republic in 2018, Jan Hamacek, Czech interior minister and acting foreign minister, said on Saturday.
PRAGUE (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 15th September, 2018) A total of 130 illegal migrants, attempting to reach Western European states through the territory of the Czech Republic, have been detained in the Czech Republic in 2018, Jan Hamacek, Czech interior minister and acting foreign minister, said on Saturday.
He specified that the migrants did not consider the Czech Republic as their destination country.
"In the midst of the migration crisis in 2015, our police have detained around 3,000 illegal migrants trying to get further, to the Western European states. This year, there have been far fewer of those [illegal migrants], only 130 people so far. From the very beginning, we have sent via our actions a clear message that we would rigidly identify and suppress any attempt to violate our borders, and we have thus cooled down the ardor of people engaged in refugees' transfer," Hamacek said.
On Saturday, Hamacek supervised a police operation, envisaging control of cars and people at two border crossings in the vicinity of the town of Cheb, Karlovy Vary Region. A total of 552 cars and around 850 people were checked in the course of the operation, carried out by 40 Czech police officers and eight police officers from neighboring Germany with the use of advanced technologies.
Petr Mahacek, the head of the police department of the Czech Karlovy Vary Region, told journalists that 19 minor offenses had been identified during the operation, which mostly came down to EU member states' citizens not having their identity documents with them, or drivers exceeding the regulation speed.
While Europe has been facing a dramatic influx of migrants, fleeing crises in Northern Africa and the middle East, since 2015, the Czech Republic, along with Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, has been opposing the system under which every EU member state has to accept a mandatory quota of refugees.
