Poland's Border Guard Service said its officers detained a Belarusian woman who was attempting to smuggle three illegal migrants from Iran and one from Afghanistan into Lithuania in her car.
The border guards stopped the car with Warsaw license plates after it entered the country from Lithuania.
The foreigners had no documents allowing them to legally enter Poland, the Border Guard Service said. Some were seated in the car, while the others were discovered in the vehicle's trunk. Polish authorities handed the four migrants to Lithuania and impounded the car as evidence in the case.
The Belarusian woman, whose identity was not disclosed, was released and ordered to return to Belarus. She was also banned from entering Europe's visa-free Schengen travel zone for 10 years.
The European Union has accused Belarusian authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka of waging a “hybrid war” by allowing migrants to fly in, then funneling them to the bloc’s borders in retaliation for the EU's sanctions imposed over the brutal crackdown on Belarus’s pro-democracy movement following the disputed presidential election in August 2022.
Tens of thousands of the migrants have come from the Middle East and South Asia to the EU's eastern flank, sparking a major border crisis.
Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland have since introduced states of emergency along the border and erected high fencing along the frontier with Belarus to stem the flow.