SKOPJE, North Macedonia (AP) - Police in North Macedonia say officers on border patrol found 47 migrants in an abandoned truck in the country’s southeast, near the borders with Bulgaria and Greece.
The parked truck was discovered late Friday with the driver gone and migrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq inside, police said in a statement issued Saturday.
The migrants were transferred to detention centers in North Macedonia’s capital of Skopje and in the southern border town of Gevgelija, police said. They entered North Macedonia from Greece, and authorities plan to deport them back there.
Police say officers intercepted a total of 1,365 migrants who entered North Macedonia illegally in the first three weeks of the year.
In a separate case, a criminal court in Skopje gave a two-year suspended sentence to a German man and an Italian woman convicted of trying to smuggle three people into North Macedonia from Greece last month with fake ID documents.
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