Latest news with #SouthwarkCourt
Times
17-05-2025
- Times
The asylum seeker who became London's £12m migrant smuggler
When officers from the National Crime Agency raided the suburban London apartment of Ahmed Ebid, they discovered two notebooks. One appeared to be a ledger of payments, while the other was stuffed with longitude and latitude co-ordinates in the Mediterranean. The discovery in June 2023 would help the NCA to unmask Ebid as one of Britain's most prolific and ruthless people smugglers. On Monday, he is expected to receive a long prison sentence at Southwark crown court in south London, after becoming the first person in Britain to be convicted of smuggling migrants across the Mediterranean. Ebid, 42, an Egyptian-born fisherman, had been granted benefits and housed in an art deco-style block in Isleworth, southwest London, after illegally crossing the Channel in a small boat
The Sun
15-05-2025
- Politics
- The Sun
Two Just Stop Oil activists who made mourners miss funerals by bringing M25 to standstill walk free from court
TWO Just Stop Oil activists who brought the M25 to a standstill walked free from court yesterday. Phoebe Plummer, 23, and David Mann, 51, were among 45 demonstrators who scaled gantries on the motorway. 3 Mourners missed funerals and students failed to get to exams in time in November 2022. Plummer was convicted by a jury of conspiring to disrupt the M25 while Mann admitted the offence. Judge Justin Cole called them 'arrogant' for thinking they were 'cleverer' than those whose lives they disrupted. He said at Southwark crown court: 'Neither of you played an organisational role but you were motivated by a desire to cause large-scale disruption.' Mann was in breach of a conditional discharge due to a previous protest while Plummer was on bail for another matter. The M25 protest also came a month after she threw soup over a Van Gogh painting in London, for which she got two years' jail. Plummer, of Lambeth, South London, told the judge: 'Whatever sentence you give me today will not deter me.' She was handed a suspended two-year jail term, with 150 hours of community service. Plummer, who is on benefits, must also pay £500 in costs, at £30 a month. Mann, of Ipswich, was given an 18-month community order, including 100 hours of service. He must also pay £200 costs at £20 a month. Last year he tried to raise cash to help pay all the fines he has racked up. 3
