A French court has found 18 people guilty of smuggling illegal immigrants across the English Channel to the UK.
Fourteen of the 18 defendants are from Iraq, with the others being French, Polish, Dutch, and Iranian.
One of the alleged ringleaders, who hailed from Iraq, was sentenced by the court in Lille, northern France, to 15 years in prison and was fined 200,000 euros ($218,000).
The others were sentenced to between two and 10 years in prison.
One of the defense lawyers, Kamel Abbas, told reporters that the severity of the sentences was a testimony to “the scale of the case, and of the intention to severely punish the smugglers.”
The investigation into the human smuggling ring was led by the OLTIM, a French national police unit specializing in immigration crime, assisted by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) and law enforcement in several other countries.
The NCA said one of those convicted in Lille was 40-year-old Kaiwan Poore, who was detained at Manchester airport in July 2022 as he attempted to board a flight to Turkey.
The NCA said the network was led by an Iranian national, Hewa Rahimpur, who was arrested in London in May 2022, extradited to Belgium, and then sentenced to 11 years in prison in October 2023.
“This network [was] among the most prolific we have come across in terms of the number of crossings they were able to organize,” NCA Deputy Director Craig Turner said in an emailed statement.
“Their sole motive was profit, and they didn’t care about the fate of migrants they were putting to sea in wholly inappropriate and dangerous boats.”
In recent years, human trafficking across the English Channel has become a lucrative trade for organized criminals.
A number of migrants have drowned trying to make the crossing.
More than 31,000 people have crossed the channel so far this year, more than the total for all of 2023.
At least 56 people have died trying to cross the channel this year, according to French officials, making 2024 the deadliest since the crossings began surging in 2018.
In March, a 7-year-old drowned when a boat carrying 16 migrants capsized in the channel.
The Conservative government under then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sought to deter illegal immigrants from crossing the channel by threatening to introduce a system whereby they would be transferred to Rwanda, where their claims for asylum would be handled.
After Labour defeated the Conservatives in the UK general election in July, newly elected Prime Minister Keir Starmer scrapped the Rwanda policy.
On Nov. 4, Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions, told Interpol’s conference in Glasgow that “people smuggling should be viewed as a global security threat similar to terrorism.”
He said intelligence and law enforcement agencies should try to “stop smuggling gangs before they act.”
The network, which was put on trial in Lille, is believed to have smuggled up to 10,000 people across the English Channel, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.
The Lille trial heard the defendants were charged after a trans-European police operation in 2022, which led to several arrests and the seizure of boats, life jackets, and cash.
There were dozens of arrests in France, the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands in July 2022.
Several of the defendants took part in the trial by videolink from various prisons in northern France, while some of the others were tried in absentia.
135 Boats Seized
Police raids on the network seized 135 boats in Germany and the Netherlands, as well as more than 1,000 life jackets, outboard engines, paddles, and cash in various denominations.The wide and shallow beaches of northern France and Belgium have been used as a launching point for large numbers of crossings.
During the trial at Canterbury Crown Court, Bah claimed he was threatened by the traffickers to drive the “unseaworthy” boat between France and the English coast on Dec. 14, 2022.
