[Stop-traffic] News/Europe: Criminal gangs ready to exploit enlarged EU

[Melanie Orhant]

Criminal gangs ready to exploit enlarged EU

By Rory Watson

The Times (UK), November 17, 2003

<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,120-897429,00.html>http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,120-897429,00.html

Europe will witness a huge surge in organised crime next year when 
ten new countries join the European Union, senior police intelligence 
officers are warning governments. Almost every one of the new 
members, eight of whom are in Central and Eastern Europe, "will 
become source, transit and destination countries for criminal goods 
and services", Europol says in a 27-page report to member states seen 
by The Times.

The report identifies criminal gangs in Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, 
Romania, Albania, the former Yugoslavia and Russia as posing the 
greatest threats to the Union. It believes that the trafficking of 
hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants into the EU, and the 
social, economic and political consequences of that trafficking, are 
now overtaking drugs-smuggling as perhaps the most serious danger 
facing the EU.
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