The small boats kingpin who smuggled 3,800 migrants into Europe

Telegraph

22-05-2025

A quiet and leafy street in Isleworth, west London, doesn't immediately spring to mind as the obvious place to find a control centre for an international people-smuggling enterprise. But in a taxpayer-funded home shared with his wife and child, that's where Ahmed Ebid helped mastermind at least seven crossings over perilous waters around Europe, involving thousands of people and resulting in at least two deaths.
'Tell them guys anyone caught with a phone will be killed, threw in the sea [sic],' Ebid told one of his associates when discussing arrangements for bringing migrants by boat from north Africa to Europe on one of the dangerous illegal crossings. His threat indicates the level of compassion he had for those whose passage he was helping to assist.
It was one of multiple crossings that Ebid played a part in arranging from his flat in west London. He didn't know that on this occasion, his conversation was being recorded.
Surveillance officers from Britain's National Crime Agency (NCA) were on his trail by then. Law enforcement was closing in and Ebid, 42, who had entered the UK illegally himself on a small boat, would soon be caught. But not before he had helped smuggle thousands of desperate migrants into Italian waters as part of a network of criminals making millions from the perilous scheme.
This week, he was jailed for 25 years for masterminding the smuggling of thousands of people across the Mediterranean into Europe. He had held, said Judge Adam Hiddleston, a 'significant managerial role within an organised crime group'.
The treatment of the migrants, on his orders and in his name, was 'horrifying', said Judge Hiddleston. 'They were simply a commodity to you,' he told Ebid. 'You talked of them in terms of units, not as people, referring to them as 'cartons'.'
It is believed that Ebid, an Egyptian, crossed the Channel with his wife and child when he came to Britain in October 2022. He moved into an address on Church Road, Isleworth. It was this unlikely base where he worked with people-smuggling networks in north Africa to organise transport across a stretch of water almost 3,000 miles away. But having previously worked as a fisherman in the Mediterranean, Ebid had what a prosecutor later described as 'intimate knowledge' of those waters, allowing him to assist with the illegal scheme even by phone from a long distance away.
He apparently knew how it should be done, not only telling an associate that migrants must not carry phones on the boats but also advising on how much drinking water the passengers would require during the crossings.
He had been in the UK for only a few weeks when he started assisting in the illegal journeys of other migrants across the Mediterranean.
More than 640 of them were rescued by Italian authorities after attempting to cross the sea from Libya in a wooden boat in October 2022. The vessel was taken into port in Sicily and two bodies were recovered.
In December that year, 265 migrants who had departed from Benghazi in Libya in a 65ft fishing boat were found adrift in the Mediterranean and rescued by the Italian coastguard.
The following April, two further search-and-rescue operations were mounted after distress calls were made to the Italian coastguard. In both cases, boats were found with more than 600 migrants on board.
There is evidence that between 2022 and 2023, Ebid was involved in at least seven separate crossings, carrying a total of almost 3,800 people into Italian waters. Some of them eventually made their way to Britain.
He played a part in moving and accommodating migrants before their journey by sea, and in dealing with paperwork, he would later admit.
He was also in regular phone contact with associates on the boats as they made the crossings, prosecutor Freddy Hookway told a judge at Southwark Crown Court in March. Ebid, he said, appeared to be providing assistance in real time.
In an effort to go below the radar, he spoke in code about 'fishing' and referred to the boats as 'cars'. The NCA described them more accurately as 'death traps'.
At least some of the migrants who paid to make these crossings had started their journey in Egypt, according to Italian media reports. From there they travelled to the Libyan coast, their departure point for Italy.
Working from home in Britain, Ebid managed the logistics and communications required for the crossings, including the transfer of the migrants from Egypt, Il Giornale reported. He is said to have played a 'vital' role in the smuggling operation.
It was a risky business but a highly lucrative one. Each migrant was charged about £3,200 on average, netting more than £12 million in total for the criminals involved. Ebid was said to have claimed he made €15,000 (almost £12,650) for his part in it. Prosecutors believe the true sum was far higher, with Ebid describing it as 'a living'.
It apparently wasn't his first involvement in criminal activity. He reportedly had a previous conviction in Italy in 2017 for attempting to import more than a ton of cannabis.
On the afternoon of June 21 2023, NCA officers swooped in London. Dressed in a white T-shirt, grey shorts and sunglasses, Ebid was arrested in the street in Hounslow on suspicion of assisting unlawful immigration. He was charged last year with people-smuggling offences as part of an international investigation into the organised crime network that was moving migrants into Europe. The probe also involved Italian prosecutors, coastguard and the Guardia di Finanza, an Italian law enforcement agency.
Investigators had bugged Ebid's home. When they seized a phone from him after his arrest, they found images of boats, conversations about the possible purchase of vessels, videos of migrants making the journey and screenshots detailing money transfers.
They also found a notebook Ebid had with pages of co-ordinates showing a route from north Africa to the southern coast of Italy.
In October 2023, he pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiring to assist illegal immigration. But he claimed he was merely a low-ranking member of the network.
Prosecutors disputed this. He was a key figure, they argued. One who 'preyed upon the desperation of migrants to ship them across the Mediterranean in death trap boats', as Jacque Beer, the NCA's regional head of investigation, put it.
Ebid's case highlights the international nature of the problem of criminal networks cashing in by orchestrating hazardous small-boat crossings for migrants hoping to reach Western Europe. The trafficking of people from the Libyan coast to Italy has been going on for many years, despite various crackdowns designed to prevent the journeys.
A European Commission report after a mission to Libya at the end of 2004 found that about 15,000 migrants had tried to reach the Italian coast illegally by crossing the Mediterranean. Almost 2,000 had died during the journey.
In 2010, Italy and Libya reached an agreement to try to curb irregular immigration, and the numbers attempting the crossing declined. But that wasn't the end of it.
In 2023, an estimated 212,000 migrants and refugees attempted to cross the central Mediterranean Sea from Libya, Algeria and Tunisia to Europe, according to a report by the United Nations Refugee Agency and the International Organisation for Migration – a 52 per cent increase compared with 2022. More than 3,105 perished or went missing at sea while trying to make the journey in 2023, compared with 2,500 the previous year. 'However, the real number of dead and missing along these routes is believed to be higher, as many incidents go unreported or undetected,' said the report.
The nature of the business run by figures such as Ebid is one that not only breaches immigration laws but endangers lives for financial gain, as Tim Burton, the special prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service, noted this week. In Ebid's case, he 'showed a complete disregard for the safety of thousands of people, whose lives were put at serious risk', said Burton.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer came to power last year with a promise to 'smash the gangs' responsible for people smuggling, and welcomed the jailing of Ebid. In reality, smashing the gangs isn't all that easy, as the ringleaders tend to base themselves overseas.
Smashing Ebid's operation is a start. The challenge will be in tracking down and bringing to justice others like him out there.