Police tackling organised immigration crime gangs make 300 arrests in a year seizing 500 boats, engines and removing website ads for their sneak-into-Britain services
Arrests of ‘untouchable’ people smugglers are up 55%, police have said. In the year to April the National Crime Agency was involved in around 300 detentions in the UK and overseas compared to 190 the year before.
Over the same period 59 people were convicted of organised immigration crimes in UK courts as a result of agency investigations. At the same time the crime agency disrupted 400 organised people trafficking networks compared to 350 the previous year.
Cops said the increases followed an uplift in resources with extra officers deployed to focus solely on organised immigration crime. Organised immigration crime now accounts for a quarter of the agency’s work.
Around 100 investigations are ongoing involving the most dangerous crime groups posing the highest threat of harm. Rob Jones, the agency’s director general operations, said: “The NCA’s role is to target the organised gangs behind people smuggling.
“We use our full range of law enforcement tactics to disrupt and dismantle networks wherever they operate, preventing harm to those they exploit for profit, protecting lives and the UK’s border security. Tackling organised immigration crime remains a top priority for the NCA and we are putting more resources into targeting the criminal networks behind it than ever before.
“We are also taking the fight against the gangs outside of Europe to locations like Iraq and Libya, targeting criminal networks who are operating in locations where they previously thought themselves untouchable.” Among those convicted last year was Egyptian national Ahmed Ramadan Mohamad Ebid who was jailed for 25 years for smuggling thousands of people across the Mediterranean from north Africa into Europe.
In January Adam Savas, who supplied thousands of boats and engines to people smugglers, was jailed for 11 years. Earlier this year six were arrested for people smuggling after a lorry containing 23 folk was stopped at Dover, Kent.
In March NCA officers were deployed to Germany to take part in an operation that saw four people arrested as part of an operation targeting another network supplying equipment to small boat gangs. More than 500 boats and engines have been seized and 10,000 online accounts, posts or pages linked to organised immigration crime removed from platforms.
Rob added: “As these cases show we aim to target people smuggling organised crime groups at every step of the route, in source countries, in transit countries, near the UK border in France and Belgium, and those operating inside the UK itself. We know our activity is having an impact, we are having a disruptive effect on organised crime groups, and we are making the UK a more difficult place for them to target.”
Border Security and Asylum minister Alex Norris said: “This Government is delivering the biggest crackdown on people smuggling ever seen. Dedicated efforts from our National Crime Agency officers have driven a 55% surge in organised immigration crime arrests – ramping up action to tackle the gangs behind this trade.
“This comes as we’ve launched a record-breaking number of enforcement actions, including arrests and sanctions, against migrant smuggling networks since coming into office. Make no mistake we will track down, detain and arrest the vile criminals who bring illegal migrants to our shores.”
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