Police in Italy believe traffickers made some $3m (£1.9m; €2.5m) from 359 illegal migrants found abandoned on a cargo ship in the Mediterranean.
The Ezadeen was towed into the Italian port of Corigliano Calabro after being found by coast guards on Friday.
Most of those aboard appear to be Syrians, in the second such case involving a freighter this week.
Both ships reportedly started in Turkey, in a change from the Libyan route usually favoured by gangs.
The police chief of Cosenza province, Luigi Liguori, said each migrant had paid between $4,000 and $8,000 to board the ship.
Officers say that the smugglers wore hoods and locked the migrants in the ship’s hold before apparently abandoning ship on a lifeboat.
In the earlier case, Italian coastguards boarded a ship, the Blue Sky M, carrying 796 migrants on Tuesday. Finding it without a crew, they steered it into the south Italian port of Gallipoli.
The smugglers’ new tactic appears to be simple and effective: point a cargo ship towards Italy and let the coastguard pick it up, the BBC’s James Reynolds reports from Corigliano Calabro.
Illegal migration to the EU has been fuelled by the civil war in Syria, which has driven people to seek asylum in Europe, along with economic migrants.
Last year it is estimated that nearly 3,500 refugees died trying to cross the Mediterranean while another 200,000 were rescued. BBC
