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The lower-level Harju regional court on Friday convicted members of a criminal group charged with involvement in smuggling Vietnamese migrants from Russia into Estonia last fall.
Estonian court hands out punishments to smugglers of Vietnamese migrants
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Andrei Nitsiportsik, 33, Evgeny Mironchenko, 41, Andrey Nefedov, 41, Aleksander Sreiner, 33, Alexander Eliseev, 28, and Vadim Pavlov, 24, were on trial charged with supporting human trafficking. Zanna Mezentseva, 44, and Lada Peus, 40, had been charged with attempted human trafficking.
Four of the defendants - Mironchenko, Sreiner, Pavlov and Mezentseva - had previous criminal punishments.
The court handed out mostly suspended sentences ranging from two years to two and a half years with probation terms of two to three years. Mironchenko was sentenced to two years and one month in jail to which the unserved part of a previous punishment was added, so he will have to spend four years and one month behind bars.
According to the statement of charges, the defendants were involved in receiving Vietnamese nationals who had been smuggled into Estonia on October 26 and November 18 last year and attempts to take them on to some other European country.
The Vietnamese, some of whom were under 18 years of age, were victims of human trafficking because their vulnerable position had placed them in a situation where they had been forced to work under unusual conditions in Russia and would have been forced to do the same in other European countries later on.