LONDON: British police have arrested 21 people during raids targeting a suspected people-smuggling ring, in a significant crackdown on the criminal networks illegally bringing migrants across the Channel into the UK.
Further progress was made in a separate operation in France, when police raided a camp known as Vietnam City in a disused coalmine south-east of Calais, where hundreds of trafficked young Vietnamese people have been housed over the past decade until they can be transferred to the UK.
About 350 officers were involved in the UK raids on Tuesday, which targeted a network believed to have helped smuggle hundreds of Iraqi-Kurdish migrants to Britain. Arrests were made around the country, following information gathered over the past year after numerous arrests of drivers who had smuggled migrants into the country in lorries.
The National Crime Agency, which coordinated the raids, said migrants were understood to have paid between £5,000 and £10,000 to travel the last stage of a journey from the Middle East. Drivers are understood to have been recruited both in France and the UK to smuggle people across the border. Police officers also raided carwashes in Durham, Cleveland and Northumbria, investigating money-laundering and people-smuggling links to workers in these businesses.
Tom Dowdall, the NCA’s deputy director, said: “The number of officers deployed today by the National Crime Agency, the police and partner agencies reflects the scale and severity of the suspected criminality. We believe we have identified and disrupted a significant network, which is suspected of smuggling hundreds of migrants into the UK. People-smugglers don’t think twice about putting lives in danger, employing a range of dangerous methods as they attempt to evade border controls. It is a crime predicated on exploitation of vulnerable people and their treatment as a commodity instead of as human beings.”
Most of the people brought into the country by the network were male Iraqi Kurds, according to the NCA, but some families were also smuggled in. The raids came as part of a joint operation carried out with officers in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, focused in particular on the smuggling routes from Calais and Dunkirk to the UK.
The arrests were not linked to the upsurge in violence in Calais last week, where a dispute between Afghan and Iraqi people-smugglers ended in shots being fired as migrants queued for food at a charitable distribution point in the town. About 22 people were taken to hospital, including four Eritreans aged between 16 and 18.
But the NCA operation reflects the higher priority and increased police resources devoted to stopping people-smuggling into the UK, Dowdall said, amid better awareness on both sides of the Channel of the role of people-smugglers in transporting refugees and migrants to the UK.
In a parallel operation early on Tuesday morning, about 50 police officers in France raided the Vietnam City camp near Angres in northern France. It has been used for over a decade by people-traffickers as a holding point for Vietnamese nationals – many of them children – who are being smuggled to the UK to work in nail bars, restaurants or cannabis farms. About 15 people were arrested, according to French media, some of them suspected of people-smuggling, others understood to be drivers responsible for transporting the Vietnamese nationals. Twenty-seven people without papers were found and were being interviewed by Vietnamese consular officials.
