VIENNA, Austria – Austria broke up a major human trafficking ring led by Romanian, Moldovan, and Ukrainian criminals who smuggled more than 5,000 Eastern Europeans to the West, many enduring horrific conditions in tiny hiding spaces in cars, trucks, and trailers, authorities said yesterday.

The Federal Criminal Investigations Office said it arrested 64 people in a large-scale operation that began last June and focused on the Alpine country’s border checkpoints.

The traffickers charged immigrants $5,125 to enter the European Union illegally, and thousands were successfully smuggled into Austria, many in small, cramped hiding places such as false floors built into vehicles, officials said.

Some of the immigrants were forced to squeeze their bodies into hiding spaces that measured less than 8 inches high – barely enough room to let them breathe, Major Gerald Tatzgern said.

“Only because of police intervention were many victims able to escape asphyxiation,” he said, suggesting some immigrants may have been near death when authorities searching vehicles at Austria’s borders found and rescued them.

Austrian state broadcaster ORF reported that four exhausted and emaciated Ukrainian women narrowly escaped death when they were rescued last month from a confined space built into a trailer after the vehicle hauling it was subjected to a routine inspection at a checkpoint near the border town of Nickelsdorf.

It quoted a regional police official, Andreas Kohs, as saying sophisticated video equipment found traces of human hair in the back of the trailer, leading to the discovery of the women. The small space had been welded shut and painted to conceal evidence of the work, and firefighters had to use torches to cut the bars and free the four, who required urgent hospitalization, Mr. Kohs said.

Police arrested the Ukrainian driver on human trafficking charges, he said.

Major Tatzgern said 59 of the suspects were arrested in Austria and the rest were taken into police custody in Hungary, Poland, and Romania, including a German and a Romanian intercepted at a checkpoint on the border with Germany and Poland. Austria, Italy, and Spain were the immigrants’ main destinations, he said.

The ring used brute force, including rape, to intimidate the immigrants, investigators said. Some victims paid for their passage through loans from gangs involved in large-scale household burglaries, police said. Others were forced to work for the gangs, Major Tatzgern said.

He said it was the first time his office had cooperated with authorities in Moldova, “and it functioned excellently.” He said the sweep was dubbed “Operation Nistru” for the river that forms part of Moldova’s border with Ukraine.

The impoverished former Soviet republic is a major source of illegal immigration. Many of the victims are young women who end up in prostitution.

The network also was involved in other criminal activities such as illicit drug and cigarette smuggling, the fencing of stolen goods, and the counterfeiting of euro banknotes, Major Tatzgern said.