Smuggling

The death toll of undocumented migrants who were abandoned in a scorching-hot trailer in Texas rose to 51 Tuesday, as President Joe Biden blamed "criminal" professional smugglers for the tragedy.

Rebeca Clay-Flores, a Bexar County official, reported the new tally of "39 men and 12 women" dead, following the Monday discovery of the tractor-trailer on an isolated road in her district.

Albanian police on Wednesday seized 45.5 kg of cocaine found in a container in the Port of Durres during a police operation codenamed "Transit".

The company's administrator and a customs agent contracted by the company were detained on charges of trafficking in narcotics.

Montenegrin Customs officers seize tobacco in the Port of Bar. Photo: Government of Montenegro

The Customs Office said it seized eight containers with 4,000 boxes of tobacco owned by a US company, Lenora International, registered in the US state of Delaware.

Darko Saric, allegedly a major Serbian drugs trafficker, was arrested on Thursday morning at his wife's villa in Belgrade's upmarket suburb of Senjak as part of an international operation coordinated by EUROPOL and EUROJUST, the EU's agencies for law enforcement and criminal justice cooperation.

Head of Montenegro's Customs Office, Milena Petricevic, at the press conference. Photo: Montenegro's Customs Office

On Wednesday, police arrested a customs officer, Dejan Dabanovic, and Mimo Perocevic, owner of a private truck company, suspected of smuggling 11,349 boxes of cigarettes out of the port.

More than 500 kilograms of cocaine have been seized on a Turkish-flagged fishing boat off the coast of Guinea and 10 people have been detained in connection with the drug smuggling, the Turkish Directorate General of Security has announced.

Austria's public broadcaster ORF, in a news report on Sunday, said the amount of hard drugs coming from the Balkans to Austria had dramatically increased recently, making effective control of the Austria-Slovenia border region of Carinthia hard to handle for law enforcement.

180 objects were products of illegal trafficking and export from their countries of origin

But Vanja Calovic-Markovic, head of the anti-corruption NGO MANS, said the results so far were underwhelming.

Police say they have dismantled a migrant smuggling ring transporting Afghans to western Europe.

The network is thought to have smuggled around 200 migrants from Romania to France and Germany, according to Europol.

The criminals pushed migrants into the back of large lorries while drivers were sleeping, it said.