About 200 Indian illegal immigrants on their way to the UK were rounded up by the Belgian police as they smashed a human trafficking ring and arrested 15 people in pre-dawn raids around Brussels.

Claiming that they have broken up the “core” of the racket, prosecutors said some of the Indians had paid up to 15,500 pounds to be taken to Britain. “This morning we executed a series of search warrants to intercept all the suspects. This operation proved this is happening on a large scale, because we found more than 200 illegal Indians,” Tim De Wolf, an assistant prosecutor dealing with the case, said.

The raids in ‘safe houses’ in and around Brussels were conducted after a year-long police investigation. Some 50 Indians were discovered hiding in a gurdwara in a suburb of Vilvorde, media reports said. Police have arrested 15 suspects allegedly involved in people-smuggling. The ring was capable of smuggling thousands of people into the UK every year, de Wolf said. “We think we found and identified 15 of the organisers of this smuggling of human beings,” he said.

According to the BBC, the would-be migrants were mainly Indian men aged between 15 and 35, as well as some women and children. Most of the migrants were from Punjab, De Wolf said. They were being kept in miserable conditions while waiting to be taken on the final leg of their journey. “We found 24 people crammed inside one windowless room, measuring around 12 sq metres,” he said.

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