Boy Smuggled In Suitcase Caught On Airport X-Ray [Photo]

A boy smuggled in a suitcase is perhaps the oddest case of illegal immigration ever. Apparently, the father attempted to reunify with his son, and when he was illegally denied, he paid a Moroccan teenager to try and sneak his son into the country.

In a related report by the Inquisitr, a Georgian man also attempted to smuggle a woman inside a suitcase across the border into Turkey.

The 8-year-old-boy was caught as the hot pink suitcase was passed through the X-ray scanner at El Tarajal on Ceuta’s border with Morocco. The 19-year-old woman had carried the luggage across the border from Morocco to Ceuta, a Spanish-governed territory in Northern Africa. She seemed fairly nervous about the suitcase, so border agents stopped her to investigate what she might be carrying.

Customs agents in Spain could not help but notice the odd human shape revealed by the X-ray.

“When they put the suitcase through the scanner, the operator noticed something strange, which seemed to be a person inside the case,” a spokesman from the Civil Guard police force said, according to the Local. “When it was opened they found a minor, in a terrible state.”

When security unzipped the insides, they found a boy smuggled in the suitcase. Fortunately, the young boy named Abou was still alive, and he told officers that he was from Africa’s Ivory Coast. The teen woman, who was not related to the boy, was arrested on the spot.

Abou revealed that his father had paid the woman to have the boy smuggled in the suitcase. It turns out the father was caught trying to illegally cross the border an hour and a half after his son was found.

The father had previously applied for family reunification but had been denied by the legal system. The judge in the case has accused the woman and the father of “a crime against the rights of foreign citizens,” with added charges related to the aggravating circumstance of endangering the child’s life.

The father also claims that he did not tell the woman to have the boy smuggled in a suitcase. He says he “did not know that was the way” in which his son was going to cross the border.

“I just wanted to take me to the Canary Islands,” he said, according to the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

But the judge did not find this argument to be persuasive. Older reports indicated that the mother of the boy may have also been arrested, but no new information has been released. The boy is currently in Spanish child protective services.

[Image via EPA]