‘Slick’ people smugglers are shipping ‘barely sea-worthy’ boats from Turkey to France to move up to 60 people a time across the Channel as authorities launch crackdown and warn migrants will cross in bigger numbers in days to come.
The biggest ever European-wide operation targeting small boat smugglers bringing migrants to the UK has begun, starting with dozens of raids across the continent and arrests in Britain.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) has played a leading role in the international operation, starting with the arrest of a man in the UK who was supplying boats via Turkey to smugglers in France, Germany and the Netherlands.
And an NCA warned that even larger numbers of people could attempt the dangerous crossing, where smugglers often charge between £2,500 and £3,500, when more ‘favourable’ weather conditions arrive this summer.
Director of threat leadership Chris Farrimond said action to tackle the supply chain in France over the last few years has made it ‘much more difficult’ for traffickers to source their boats, engines and life jackets along the French coast — so they have turned to another method spanning several countries.
A man is arrested in Catford, south east London, as part of the biggest ever European-wide operation targeting small boat smugglers
Police arrest a man in Catford, south east London, as part of the biggest ever European-wide operation targeting small boat smugglers
The biggest ever European-wide operation targeting small boat smugglers bringing migrants to the UK has begun, starting with dozens of raids across the continent and arrests in Britain. Pictured, boats now in Dover that were used by people thought to be migrants
The NCA deployed officers to Germany where more than 60 boats and 900 life jackets, which would have been used to transport people across the Channel, were recovered from a farm near Osnabruck
The boats and life jackets recovered from a farm near Osnabruck will now be examined by NCA specialists
The seized life jackets were taken from a farm near Osnabruck, Germany
Seized boats, yet to be inflated, were being stored at a farm near Osnabruck, Germany
Speaking at a briefing, he said: ‘So they’ve been sourcing them via Turkey, and basically warehousing them in Germany and then calling them forward as they require them for the crossings. And it’s quite a slick operation.’
‘It really required us to get into that small boat supply chain in order to understand what the traffickers were doing,’ Mr Farrimond said. ‘And then attack them where it was going to hit their logistics and make life difficult for them.’
Authorities from Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands and the UK have teamed up to try and bust the organised gangs that are charging people between £2,500 and £3,500 to get them across the English Channel.
More than 10,000 people have crossed the Channel so far this year, often in small, cheap, inflatable dinghies that put the travellers at risk of drowning in what can be an unpredictable stretch of water.
Mr Farrimond described the boats as ‘cheap, barely sea-worthy vessels’. Pictured, of a group of people thought to be migrants are rescued off the coast of Folkestone, Kent
Mr Farrimond described the boats as ‘cheap, barely sea-worthy vessels’ used to hold up to 60 people which are driven by an ‘underpowered engine which can’t really shift the number of people who are on board’.
The NCA announced that it has arrested six people in London and that dozens of arrests were being carried out on the continent as part of the new operation.
Mr Farrimond added: ‘Most of the activity took place in Europe but that doesn’t mean we’re not a big player in this.
‘It was our intelligence which started this all off and which led to the culmination that we had today.
‘This all started from our point of view with an arrest by NCA officers in May of a London-based individual called Rahimpur.
‘He is originally from Iran and our Belgian colleagues are looking to extradite him out.
‘He is the one we believe to have been living in the UK but was coordinating the supply of small boats from Turkey to supply that chain through to France and other locations so he was having boats delivered to Germany, France and the Netherlands.’
Home Secretary Priti Patel said that the arrests send a clear message to criminal gangs ‘who are preying on vulnerable people across Europe and beyond’.
‘We will stop at nothing to end your sordid trade, bring you to justice and save lives,’ she said.
‘This hugely significant operation once again shows the NCA and our international partners working diligently to dismantle people-smuggling networks.
‘These callous individuals treat human lives as a commodity and we will continue to work with our partners to ensure that they feel the full force of our new, tougher laws designed to break their business model and suitably punish them for their despicable crimes.’
The NCA also wants to attack the communication and financial networks of organised gangs and it will be working closely with its European partners to do this.
Mr Farrimond added: ‘We’ve been working with social media companies to have information taken down off their sites, that has been quite successful and we’ve also been working around the banking side too.
‘And putting out alerts to the maritime industries to say, if people are trying to buy these things, please report that and we’ve had a certain amount of success with that too.
‘Slick’ people smugglers are shipping ‘barely sea-worthy’ boats from Turkey to France to move up to 60 people a time across the Channel. Pictured, a group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, onboard a Border Force vessel on July 4
People smugglers are buying ‘barely sea-worthy’ boats in Turkey, storing them in warehouses in Germany and then shipping them to France. Pictured, a young girl is carried by a member of the military as a group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, on July 4
‘On an operational day-to-day level, the work with our French colleagues is massively important because if we do get snippets of intel we need to be able to pass it to French colleagues quickly and then they know how to put it out.
‘Officers are working literally on desks next to each other, all sharing intel and making sure we make the very best of the intel from both countries and that is proving very successful indeed.’
NCA officers work in a joint intelligence cell in France and French police have ‘upped their game quite considerably’, Mr Farrimond added. ‘They’re putting a lot of effort into stopping the boats going at all now.’
He said: ‘The French assessment is that if they were to be able to stop 75 per cent of the boats leaving the French coast, then that would effectively break the traffickers’ model.
‘There wouldn’t be enough money in the trade to make it worthwhile for them.
‘They’re not at 75 per cent at the moment, they’re much closer to around about 50 per cent. But they really have stepped it up.
‘And they’ve got a lot of coastline to cover, and they’re never going to have quite enough officers for it. So they’re having more success there.’
On days of ‘favourable’ weather conditions for crossings, Mr Farrimond said it was feared there would be very large numbers attempting the dangerous journey. But he added: ‘We haven’t seen quite that number at the moment.’
Discussing the scale of migrant crossings — with more than 12,800 having arrived in the UK so far this year — he said there was a ‘degree of supply and demand’, adding: ‘We’ve got individuals who have effectively sold their life savings, or else they’ve borrowed heavily.
‘They’ve made the perilous trek from where they came in order to get to northern France. And they’re pretty determined to get across the Channel.
‘The only the levers that we can exert from an NCA point of view is that we can make the job of the trafficking groups as difficult as possible so they can’t ply their trade.’
Highlighting the dangers of interacting with people smuggling groups, he warned there was evidence of violence linked to the organised crime gang currently being investigated by the NCA and law enforcement across Europe, adding: ‘One member of the network was wounded by a gunshot in a migrant camp in France in September 2021 … There are rival groups which is why we’ve had violence in camps.’
The NCA has also been working with social media companies to remove information from their sites as well as banks in a bid to track cash.
Alerts have been issued to maritime industries to call on them to report people buying large amounts of certain items which could be used.
NCA Deputy Director of Threat Leadership Andrea Wilson said: ‘Our intelligence tells us that this is having an impact.’
While there has been an increase of ‘illegal crossings’ through ‘lorry drops’ in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as rare occasions where small aircraft and larger boats have been used, small boats are still a ‘cheap and attractive option for migrants, despite the risks’, he added.
People smugglers who brought TEN THOUSAND migrants to Britain across Channel in 18 months are arrested in dawn raids across Europe – as Priti Patel plans to create ‘league table’ of nations for asylum-seeker deportation deals
A ‘highly lucrative’ smuggling operation which illegally shipped 10,000 people across the English Channel has been crushed following the ‘biggest ever’ internationally coordinated crackdown of its kind, spanning five European countries.
Officers in Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Germany staged dawn raids involving ‘hundreds of officers’, according to police in the northwestern German city of Osnabrueck, considered a major hub for the illegal networks.
According the the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), officers arrested six men and a woman in the Docklands and Catford areas of London as part of the police operation on Tuesday.
They included a 26-year-old man, who was arrested on suspicion of conspiring to facilitate illegal immigration, in Rushey Green, Catford, alongside a 22-year-old man in St Davids Square, on the Isle of Dogs.
A 20-year-old woman and 18-year-old man were also detained, on suspicion of possessing class A drugs with intent to supply, after a quantity of what is suspected to be cocaine was found. They remain in custody and are being questioned by NCA investigators.
Two other men were arrested for immigration offences and will now be dealt with by the immigration authorities.
News of the raids came as Home Secretary Priti Patel (pictured at Silverstone at the weekend) announced her latest measure to tackle the scourge of illegal immigration, which will reportedly see the creation of a ‘league table’ of nations based on their level of co-operation in accepting criminals and failed asylum seekers from the UK
The NCA said: ‘Officers have today joined what is believed to be the biggest ever international operation targeting criminal networks suspected of using small boats to smuggle thousands of people into the UK.’
Police in Germany earlier said there were ‘numerous searches and arrests in several states’, coordinated by Europol and the EU’s judicial agency Eurojust.
Many of the suspects in the country were Iraqi-Kurdish and were feared to have been ‘armed and dangerous’, leading to the deployment of special forces to various warehouses and private addresses, reported Der Spiegel.
News of the raids came as Home Secretary Priti Patel announced her latest measure to tackle the scourge of illegal immigration, which will reportedly see the creation of a ‘league table’ of nations based on their level of co-operation in accepting criminals and failed asylum seekers from the UK.
Officers in Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Germany staged dawn raids involving ‘hundreds of officers’, according to police in the northwestern German city of Osnabrueck, considered a major hub for the smugglers. Pictured, a group of people thought to be migrants arrive in Dover on July 4
Meanwhile her controversial Rwanda policy, which promises to fly those arriving illegally to Britain to the east African country, has failed to get off the ground following a slew of legal challenges.
Germany’s Der Spiegel reported that the operation targeted organised groups taking migrants to England.
It quoted Osnabrueck police as saying that the network had smuggled up to 10,000 people via the Channel in the last 12 to 18 months in a highly lucrative scheme.
The coordinated action with Britain comes amid growing tensions between London and the EU in the wake of Brexit, while ties are particularly strained with France over the issue of migration.
Now Britain has left the European Union, it no longer has a migrant returns treaty with the 27-nation bloc.
Britain has repeatedly accused the French authorities of not doing enough to stop the crossings.
Despite promises of more cooperation, the number of migrants seeking to cross the Channel from France to England surged in the first half of this year, according to the French interior ministry.
From January 1 to June 13, there were 777 attempted crossings involving 20,132 people, up 68 percent on the same period last year, it said.
In a controversial policy, the UK is planning to deport illegal migrants, including those who arrive across the Channel, to Rwanda under an agreement with the African nation.
However, the first flight last month was cancelled after a last-minute intervention by the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), a decision which enraged London.
It comes as Home Secretary Priti Patel will reportedly create a so-called ‘league table’ of nations based on their level of co-operation in accepting criminals and failed asylum seekers from the UK.
The table will be used to pressure countries to agree to individual return deals, according to the Times, with those who refuse to take back their own foreign criminals and illegal immigrants to face sanctions.
The paper added that powers available via the Nationality and Borders Act (NABA) which came into force last Tuesday will allow the Home Secretary to suspend visa applications for citizens from those countries, impose a £190 surcharge on their applications or increase visa processing times.
The table will show those countries – such as Albania, Nigeria and Poland – which are more willing to accept back criminals and failed asylum seekers in the hope that doing so encourages other countries to follow suit.
The Times said the visa penalties will apply to all aspects of the visa service including study, work, visitor and settlement visas.
It comes after the Government in April signed a £120 million economic and migration deal to send failed asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Rwanda’s human rights record is high among the concerns about the arrangement, with no one-way flights for migrants having taken off yet due to legal challenges.
Ms Patel announced the deal in a bid to deter people from crossing the Channel to the UK in small boats, but more than 3,000 migrants crossed in June – the highest monthly total this year.
Some 3,136 made the crossing on 76 boats in the 30-day period, with journeys taking place on 19 of those days, according to PA news agency analysis of government figures.
So far this year, around 12,700 people have made the crossing after navigating busy shipping lanes from France in small boats such as dinghies.
The National Crime Agency has vowed to continue trying to tackle people smuggling after a series of arrests were made over the deaths of 27 people trying to cross the Channel last year.
The NABA’s measures, which received royal assent in April, include tougher penalties for those who pilot a small boat or smuggle migrants into the UK by other dangerous or illegal means, with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
The maximum penalty for illegally entering the UK or overstaying a visa has increased from six months to four years in prison, with other measures in place over asylum applications and new powers for authorities to search vessels for migrants.