Prosecutors from the Lviv Regional Prosecutor’s Office have sent an indictment to court against three individuals who organized the illegal transportation of a man of conscription age abroad.
A 37-year-old resident of Khmelnytskyi region, together with two men from the Chernivtsi district, developed a scheme to profit from smuggling a conscript abroad. According to their plan, a ‘client’ from Lviv was to be transported around checkpoints to the Chernivtsi region. For concealment, the accomplices changed cars five times and first took the conscript to the Khmelnytskyi region, then to the Ternopil region, and only after that to the Chernivtsi region. From there, he was delivered to the ‘departure’ point – 30 km from the Ukrainian-Romanian border.
There, after receiving detailed instructions, the man was supposed to cross the border outside of official checkpoints. The ‘transporters’ valued their services at 11,000 US dollars. One of them, a 34-year-old resident of Chernivtsi region, was detained in May under Article 208 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine near the state border after receiving payment from the ‘client’.
The two others, an organizer and a 29-year-old resident of the Chernivtsi region, were hiding from the investigation, but thanks to the coordinated work of law enforcement, they were found and detained in September. All three defendants are charged with illegal transportation of people across the state border of Ukraine (Part 3 of Article 332 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine). The pre-trial investigation is conducted by the Main Directorate of the National Police in the Lviv region, with operational support by the Main Directorate of Internal Security of the SSU.
Note: According to Article 62 of the Constitution of Ukraine, a person is presumed innocent of a crime and cannot be subjected to criminal punishment until proven guilty in a legal manner and established by a court conviction.