On the trail of gangsters who get rich smuggling migrants to Britain

Times

3 days ago

Hidden behind a row of shops is Stefano Road, a quiet residential street on the outskirts of Preston. It seems an unlikely place to find a criminal mastermind.
That was until May last year, when officers from the National Crime Agency (NCA) arrived to detain Amanj Hassan Zada, a 34-year-old Iraqi Kurd.
Zada kept a low profile in Lancashire but in his native Kurdistan he was widely regarded as one of the region's most successful traffickers, running a vast, international people-smuggling operation. At a party in Iraq in 2021, he had been filmed showering musicians with cash and firing a gun in the air as they lauded his exploits as the 'best smuggler'.
His profligacy ultimately proved his undoing. In Britain, the NCA started recording his conversations with other smugglers. From these intercepts, they were able to piece together a highly sophisticated enterprise centred on ferrying migrants across the English Channel in small boats that stretched across Europe and back to Iraq.
It marked the first time the NCA had gone after the kingpins 'upstream' — outside the UK — having been tasked to 'smash the gangs' as one of Sir Keir Starmer's key election pledges.
Since then the Home Office has drawn up an internal list of several dozen most wanted people smugglers whose capture they believe would disrupt the criminal gangs.
After Zada was jailed for 17 years in November, NCA officers travelled to Iraq to help arrest three of his accomplices. One was a banker providing hawala services, the trust-based payment system commonly used by illegal migrants. A second man, also living on Stefano Road, has been charged with assisting Zada and is awaiting trial.
Through a new pact with Iraq, the NCA is also now working regularly with the Kurdish regional authorities and is understood to have a permanent presence in the region. In Libya, NCA intelligence has also contributed to a number of arrests.
Zada's network, though, was merely a cog in a machine that spans continents. Experts now liken the small boats trade to the multibillion-pound drugs trade, where key players are quickly replaced by new opportunists should they be captured.
On Thursday — the day that Starmer announced his latest 'one in, one out' deal with President Macron — 573 migrants arrived from France, taking the total to have crossed the Channel in small boats this year to 21,690. Another 353 arrived on Friday. Each would have paid about £2,500 to secure passage, meaning that in total their traffickers netted more than £1.4 million from Thursday alone. This summer, they can expect many more paydays like it.
For years, smugglers largely trafficked illegal migrants into the UK by concealing them in trucks, cars and ferries. Migrants tended to rely on smugglers of their own nationality, with no single group wielding control on the French coast.
This began to change from 2015 onwards, as an influx of migrants fleeing civil war and persecution in Syria and sub-Saharan Africa headed for Britain led to heightened security checks.
Initially, the smugglers shifted to riskier methods, such as stowing migrants in refrigerated lorries. But use of this route significantly decreased after 39 Vietnamese migrants were found dead in the back of an HGV in Grays, Essex, in 2019.
Seizing their opportunity, Kurdish smugglers began experimenting with small boats across the Channel, their passengers predominantly refugees from Iraq and Iran, with growing numbers of Syrians and Afghans following later. The Kurds quickly established dominance over the key embarkation points, often through the use of violence, spreading from Calais eastwards to Dunkirk and then on to Zeebrugge in Belgium. By the end of 2023, the French authorities estimated there were approximately 30 smuggling networks in place along the coast.
According to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (Gitoc), an independent research institute based in Geneva, these Kurdish gangs carved up territory according to their members' home turf; smugglers from Ranya in Iraqi Kurdistan, close to the Iranian border, now control large swathes of the coast around Calais and Dunkirk.
Ranya's inhabitants are known for their involvement in the 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime, and one of Europe's most notorious people-smugglers hails from a town in the same province. Last year Barzan Majeed, known as Scorpion, was arrested by Kurdish officials after a major two-year international police operation to search out and destroy his gang, until then the most powerful smuggling gang operating between the UK and the continent.
Albanian criminal networks began to enter the market from 2021, and with them came thousands of illegal migrants from the country. However, experts believe they still ultimately answer to the Kurds.
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A Chatham House report from 2024 notes that the Kurds' dominance is likely to come down to a combination of geography, history and ongoing instability in the region. Kurdistan, whose people have long pushed for independence, straddles northern Iraq, northern Syria, southern Turkey and northwestern Iran. In Iraqi Kurdistan, conflict, corruption and high levels of poverty are likely to be contributing factors — as well as the region's location: it lies along some of the key overland migrant routes from Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Iran.
By 2022, the number of people reaching British shores on flimsy dinghies had surged to 42,755, up from 299 just four years earlier. Economies of scale ensured that the cost fell: the price of a place on board — between £2,500 and £4,000 per person — is now a fraction of what it costs to be smuggled into the UK in a lorry. Within the space of eight years the small boats trade has exploded, bringing more than 170,000 people across the Channel. Over that period, 247 have drowned.
Evidence suggests that the small boat gangs are typically comprised of up to 12 individuals, with the kingpin, often Kurdish, overseeing the operation from overseas, either in their native country or, as with Zada, in a western one. They often have a trusted lieutenant more heavily involved in running the routes. The people-smugglers also have trusted handlers dotted along the route in countries such as Libya and Turkey.
In France, several members of the network will act as guides, steering the migrants to the coast. Others will be charged with logistics and delivering the boats and fuel to the launch point on the beaches. The remainder operate as guards, scouting the area for rivals, the French police and border guards.
Albanian smugglers have also moved into northern France, but often only as middlemen or clients of Kurdish overlords, who still make the big decisions around boat departures. With the large influx of Eritrean and Afghan migrants now seeking passage along the coast, growing numbers from those countries can also now be found working for Kurdish gangs.
More recently, the gangs have stepped up a new gear thanks to an extra contingent of 'small hands'. These are migrants who help to recruit passengers from their own nationality or ethnicity for the gangs, as well as prepare the boats for launch. Some are given free passage to the UK in exchange, but increasingly the small hands are starting to charge for their services.
Gitoc's fieldwork suggests the fee can be £800 to £1,200 per boat filled, with some small hands now making so much money — up to £8,500 a month — that they are choosing to remain on the French coast rather than crossing to the UK to work in low-paid black market jobs.
These middlemen are increasingly pivotal to the function of the trade — so much so that the NCA has advised ministers that taking them out could be easier and more disruptive than targeting the kingpins.
'The thing you've got to remember about the gangs is they are very agile,' said Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, describing their operation as like Whac-A-Mole, where shutting down one network leads only to another ramping up its activities. 'As long as there is demand, like the illicit drugs trade, there will be people looking to make money out of it, because it is a huge business. It operates on established principles in that way.'
The small boats trade relies on a web of payments and international money transfers that are notoriously difficult for law enforcement to trace and disrupt.
There are a vast array of payment and travel options for migrants seeking passage to Britain. Some will pay the full fee upfront in France or their home country; others half and half, with 'bag men' in the UK collecting the remaining fees on behalf of the gangs over the Channel.
Among Vietnamese migrants, there are examples of individuals making only a small down payment on the proviso that they enter bonded debt on arriving in the UK, often by working in cannabis farms and nail bars.
'The method of payment depends on the smugglers,' Solomon explains. 'Some want an upfront down payment and then a proportion paid later. But invariably now the gangs are requiring upfront payments.'
The more established Kurdish gangs also offer a package deal, providing transit from a migrant's country of origin all the way to the French coast — and even false passports, often made in Turkey. On Telegram, the encrypted social media app commonly used by drug dealers and smugglers, there have been examples of gangs advertising transit for Iranians and Iraqis via Turkey and Belarus to Germany for as little as £6,900.
Migrants will often make hawala payments during several legs of the journey. In this informal, trust-based system — commonly used by Iranians, Iraqis, Sudanese and Afghans — money passes up a chain of trusted money handlers (hawaladars) without any actual cash crossing borders. Payments can be made to one person and then taken out by another further up the chain.
The hawaladars, who do business outside the conventional banking system, are stationed across the routes, including near coastal camps in France. Some small-boat migrants have told reporters they were given different options of where to pay — Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey — before being linked up with the appropriate handler.
This system offers flexibility to the migrants, while allowing the smugglers to amass profits without leaving a paper trail. However, specialist money transfer services such as Western Union — commonly used by migrants to send remittances back home — are also thought to be used.
'This isn't just smuggling gangs operating across the Channel, it's people operating through the Middle East, north Africa and Europe,' Solomon said. 'It's very difficult to take down this kind of operation in a way that will result in a dramatic reduction in people taking these dangerous journeys.'
Where the profits from the trade go is largely unknown, but what is clear is that they are growing — rapidly. Xavier Delrieu, the senior official in the French interior ministry responsible for tackling small boats, estimates that in 2022 alone the gangs would have made £130 million.
There is also some evidence that the bosses are seeking to reinvest the proceeds in land and property in their home countries, while others are thought to be diversifying into drugs and arms trafficking.
The supply of readily available rigid inflatable boats (ribs) has dwindled as a result of a deliberate crackdown in Europe, so smugglers are increasingly sourcing cheap craft and engines from thousands of miles away in China.
At about £8,500 each, including delivery, the boats are often smuggled into Turkey in containers and then brought to Europe — typically Germany, Belgium or the Netherlands — where they are then packed into vans and SUVs and driven to the French coast. Germany was until recently the key transit hub, with asylum seekers there often paid thousands of pounds to transport the boats to France.
Relatively tiny outlays on equipment allow the gangs to extract staggering profits: a boat carrying 50 migrants can net them £100,000 per trip. Last year, one smuggler told Sky News that he had made just under £700,000 from launching a dozen dinghies.
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However, this supply chain is vulnerable to disruption from international law enforcement — and it is here that the NCA and its European partners appear to be securing tangible results. In November 2022 the NCA launched Operation Punjum, a series of dawn raids run in tandem with hundreds of officers from Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Germany, to dismantle a major boat network. It resulted in dozens of arrests and hundreds of boat seizures.
This co-operation has since stepped up further, with the NCA now monitoring the movement of boats and engines across Europe (it will not say where, in case the smugglers then change their tactics) through covert tracking devices. On the Turkey-Bulgaria border, sniffer dogs trained by the agency to detect the smell of hidden dinghies are also being used to patrol key checkpoints. With its partners, the agency says it has seized 650 boats since 2023.
However, this success may have inadvertently created a new headache. With boats harder to procure and the smugglers seeking ever greater profits, the number of migrants being squeezed on to them has risen dramatically in recent years. While some of this can be explained by smugglers acquiring larger boats, more often it is because they are dangerously overloading them. In 2021 the French border police reported an average of 27 people occupying each vessel. Four years on, in March, the Home Office in Britain reported the average number per boat had doubled to 54. There have even been cases of 70 people, including women and children, being crammed on to a single boat.
With Starmer under mounting political pressure to get a grip on illegal migration, a three-pronged strategy for dealing with the boats is finally cranking into action.
So far the NCA has been involved in more than 190 arrests in the UK and overseas relating to organised immigration crime in 2024-25, although it is unclear how many kingpins it has been able to take down.
Rob Jones, director-general of operations at the NCA, told The Sunday Times: 'Much of the criminality involved in organised immigration crime lies outside the UK. We target and disrupt organised crime groups at every step of the route, in source countries, in transit countries such as Greece, Italy, north Africa and Turkey, near the UK border in France and Belgium, and those operating inside the UK itself.
'We have expanded our international footprint and targeted criminals operating in places where they previously thought they were untouchable, including recent arrests in the Kurdistan region of Iraq and Libya.'
Back in Westminster, ministers are pushing through legislation they argue will finally confer on enforcement agencies the counterterrorism-style powers they need to bring down the gangs. Under the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, officers will be able to intervene as soon as they find evidence of gangs preparing to smuggle migrants to the UK. This includes those suspected of selling or handling parts for small boats, or who are collecting information for gangs to help arrange departure points, times and dates.
The Home Office argues that had these rules been in place when Zada was active, the NCA already had enough evidence of him discussing moving migrants and purchasing vessels to have arrested him. For the gangs operating in France, it will allow the UK to request the arrest of a people-smuggler at an earlier stage.
Under other provisions, migrants who endanger lives at sea will face jail sentences of up to five years. These measures are primarily targeted at the middlemen and gang enforcers who intimidate or coerce migrants onto the boats, but its application could extend to migrants refusing to be rescued or who impede others on board their dinghy.
The third prong of the strategy centres on diplomacy: convincing European states and countries of origin to allow Britain to return illegal migrants and failed asylum seekers. The UK has struck more than 20 such arrangements, some better than others. After a new deal with Albania in 2022, the UK managed to send back 6,000 migrants in just 12 months. A previously huge spike in arrivals from Albania also fell dramatically.
Having secured a pilot agreement with France last week, Starmer now hopes to strike a 'full-fat' returns deal by the end of this summer with Iraq, in what is likely to be the most significant arrangement made since the one with Albania. In 2024 more than 2,000 small-boat migrants came from Iraq. The deal has been worked on behind closed doors for months, with Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, holding talks with Iraq's interior minister during a border security summit at Lancaster House in London in March.
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The operation to arrest Zada was only possible thanks to a UK-Iraq security pact negotiated by Cooper in November focused on disrupting the Kurdish gangs that dominate the small boats trade along France's northern coast.
However, even if these strategies succeed, there are few experts who believe the small boat gangs can be eradicated entirely. 'As long as there is conflict and violence around the world … then the gangs will inevitably still be able to operate, because there is a supply of people willing to pay for their business when legal routes don't exist,' said Solomon.
'There is no one magic bullet and therefore the risk is that smashing the gangs quickly becomes an empty slogan unless it's combined with other measures.
'In many ways you need to be a bit more honest about the complexity of the challenge you are facing. The risk is that it's seen to be overpromising and underdelivering.'