Assignment: Bulgaria - the people smugglers
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2024
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Migration is high on the political agenda in countries across Europe, as the number of asylum seekers rises once more. As well as those who risk life and limb on flimsy boats in the Mediterranean, thousands more come via the Balkans, many of them through Turkey and across the border into Bulgaria. They don’t stay there long. Their preferred destinations are further west, Germany perhaps or Britain. And while the migrants’ stories have become well-known in recent years, we hear relatively little from the people who enable their journeys, the people smugglers.
For Assignment, Nick Thorpe has been to the north-west of Bulgaria, where it meets Serbia to the west and Romania across the Danube to the north. There he meets two men who worked as drivers for a smuggling organisation, shuttling migrants from Sofia, the capital, to the border.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | World of Secrets, Season 2, investigates allegations surrounding one of the most powerful religious figures of the 21st century, TB Joshua. |
| 0:10.0 | Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC Podcasts. |
| 0:19.7 | You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Nick Thorpe and for this |
| 0:24.8 | edition of assignment I'm in northern Bulgaria. I'm in northern Bulgaria. So I was just a bit more a little bit of our ability. |
| 0:35.0 | It was a really tough day for us and our families. |
| 0:37.0 | I can't really describe not feeling, you know, that chill that run through me when I saw the blue flashing light. |
| 0:46.0 | It's very hard to explain. |
| 0:48.0 | This is Slavi. He's a large man in his early 30s with a trim beard wearing a dark fleece with a hood. |
| 0:56.0 | The GPS map showed us that we're about 50 meters from the Serbian border in the woods. |
| 1:06.0 | We were driving up a hill and the police car was coming down there and we couldn't get past each other and then they must have realized that we were four cars in a row and they |
| 1:15.3 | turning the blue light and drove right up to us. |
| 1:18.4 | There was no way for us to go. |
| 1:20.7 | Why didn't a pilot car warn you? |
| 1:24.0 | Because there was no mobile phone signal in that particular area. |
| 1:30.0 | I provided didn't have any coverage out there. |
| 1:32.0 | What did you say to them? |
| 1:34.0 | Oh, nothing really. |
| 1:38.0 | Didn't say anything. |
| 1:39.0 | I'm just in shock. |
| 1:41.0 | I remember only that I sent the text of my dad telling them I've been caught |
| 1:46.8 | so that he'd know where we were. |
| 1:49.1 | The police had realized immediately what Slavi and his friends were up to. |
... |
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