The public prosecutor’s office in eastern Poland is investigating more than 180 cases involving suspected smugglers trying to bring migrants to the EU via Belarus.
More than 700 people were affected by the investigations, a spokesperson for the Bialystok prosecutor’s office told the PAP news agency on Wednesday.
Van drivers were being investigated along with the so-called “pilots’’ who, in many cases, were supposed to help the drivers avoid checkpoints on the roads.
The Polish government says Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko was deliberately bringing refugees from war-torn regions to the EU’s external border.
In May, Lukashenko said Minsk would no longer stop migrants from travelling onwards into the EU, in response to tougher Western sanctions imposed on Belarus for the violent repression of peaceful protest after contested elections.
The Polish government had already built a barbed wire fence along the border with Belarus and is planning to erect a permanent structure.
Since the beginning of the year, the Polish border guard had registered almost 26,000 illegal attempts to cross the border, 14,200 of them in October alone.
