The long-term goal is to make the Balkans stable enough for asylum seekers to stay there. In the meantime, the government wants joint police operations to hunt down the bosses in the transit countries, one by one. An expanded role for Europol is envisaged. Wire taps, surveillance and informants are to penetrate the networks. The fall of Josip and Gloria Loncaric is cited as the way ahead.
Police believe the networks have been left vulnerable by their expansion.
And clients will pay up, they always do. The rise and fall of a Sino-Balkan trafficking network has been hailed as a model breakthrough which European police and immigration authorities should study and replicate. Twenty years ago a Croatian taxi driver, Josip Loncaric, started delivering fruit and veg to the Italian border and branched out into smuggling people. When Yugoslavia broke up, demand and profit soared. Loncaric bought a fleet of cars and vans and transported hundreds of Albanians and Yugoslavs.