A Polish couple has been sentenced by a German court to jail terms for stuffing 16 Kurdish migrants into a van and driving them to Germany from Belarus under inhumane conditions.
"You have made yourselves guilty of inhumane and degrading treatment of people," the judge said on February 10.
The judge imposed a three-year sentence on the 39-year-old man, who was found to lack a driver's license.
The woman received a sentence of two years and four months.
The couple had admitted transporting the Iraqi Kurdish group -- 12 adults and four children -- from the city of Bialystok on Belarus's border through Poland to Germany, where they were discovered by police in what were called inhumane conditions.
SEE ALSO: Iraq Plans More Repatriation Flights As Belarus Tells Migrants They Can Go To The EUThe two were to receive about $860 for their work.
German investigators said the Iraqi migrants had paid a total of about $112,000 to a trafficking ring, which took them to Belarus by air and then to the Polish border.