The alert border guards immediately suspected that something was wrong with the girl: she was clearly nervous, looked around anxiously, and answered the questions of the Spanish border guards with noticeable agitation. The customs officers initially thought they were dealing with a drug smuggler, especially since such 'tourists' are not uncommon at the border between Africa and Europe.
The girl's luggage was sent for additional X-ray screening, and she herself was about to be searched. However, a thorough search was not needed: the X-ray of the suitcase yielded an unexpected result. It turned out that a little boy curled up into a ball was hidden in the passenger's luggage!
When the stunned Spanish border guards opened the suitcase, the little boy was not scared at all; instead, he stuck his head out, greeted everyone loudly, and proudly said his name was Abu. It turned out that the boy is eight years old and originates from Côte d'Ivoire. On Spanish territory, his father was waiting for him, who allegedly could not bring his son to Europe in any other way. That is why the father hired an acquaintance for a large reward, who was supposed to deliver the illegal live cargo.
As 'Russkaya Germaniya' writes, both the client and the executor of this 'operation' have been arrested, and now the judicial authorities will deal with them. The border guards themselves say that they discovered the boy in the suitcase just in time. Otherwise, he could have simply suffocated.
Literally two months ago, the media already reported on two cases of human smuggling in luggage. Thus, in early March, an unlucky French smuggler was taken off a train from Moscow to Nice at the Belarusian-Polish border. The young man tried to bring his own newlywed wife into the Schengen area in a suitcase. It turned out that the young woman had not been able to obtain a French visa in time, so the enterprising husband chose this unusual way for her to cross the border. The press service of the Polish border guard unit from Terespol later stated that suspicions were raised by the unusually large suitcase of the 'smuggler'. However, the Poles never assumed they would find live cargo in it.
Probably, the Turkish border guards did not expect to find unusual contraband either. At the end of March, they asked a 25-year-old citizen of Georgia, who was going through customs control upon entering the country, to open his suitcase. Inside the suitcase was a 22-year-old Georgian woman, who was thus trying to cross the Turkish-Georgian border. She stated that she decided on such a strange act after she had been denied entry to Turkey the previous time. Both Georgian citizens were deported from Turkey and banned from entering the country for the next five years.