Peru rescues 23 Afghans from migrant traffickers

LIMA (AFP): Peruvian authorities on Sunday rescued 23 Afghans from migrant traffickers along the border with Brazil, the attorney general’s office said.

The migrants, who were trying to get to Ecuador, paid money to people smugglers to transport them across the nation and to the northern border, prosecutors said.

But they were cheated out of their money and crowded into a house without food in the village of Inapari in the Madre de Dios department along the Peru-Brazil border, a statement from the prosecutor’s office said.

Among the victims were “four children, including a two-month-old baby,” it said.

Prosecutors did not say how much the migrants had paid the smugglers.

The Afghans were led to believe they would be transferred to a regional city, then on to the capital Lima before heading to Tumbes, a city near Peru’s northern border with Ecuador.