West Africa - new transit hub for human smuggling

Almost 150 Sri Lankan migrants attempting to reach Canada have been arrested in Benin in the latest sign West Africa has become a transit hub for people smuggling.

A smuggling syndicate brought the migrants to Benin before demanding more money and threatening to harm them. All 148 eventually agreed to return to Sri Lanka and were deported Thursday.

A Canadian official confirmed the incident. The office of Jason Kenny, the Citizenship and Immigration Minister, said it showed that "thugs and criminals" continued to view Canada as a human smuggling destination.Coming after similar incidents in Togo and Ghana, the case points to the region's new prominence as a stopover for human smugglers targeting Canada. The routing shift may be a response to a crackdown on human smugglers using Southeast Asia as a transit point.

"One of the universal truths about human smuggling is that networks will use points of least resistance to get people through," said Jean-Philippe Chauzy, spokesman for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which helped the Benin migrants.

"So when you have a border that's being toughened or when you've got increased surveillance at ports or airports in one part of the world, then the network will basically adapt.

And West Africa is probably a transit region now for migrants."

Last year, more than 200 Sri Lankans who had paid agents for passage to Canada were abandoned in Togo.

In May, police in neighbouring Ghana, acting on a tip off from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, arrested several Sri Lankans who were allegedly planning to use a fishing boat to ferry migrants to Canada.

-National Post