Trafficking gangs behind the deadly Channel crossings are deploying increasingly sophisticated techniques, including: 🔴 putting up migrants in hotels 🔴 delivering them directly to embarkation beaches
It has also emerged that one smuggling group has been operating by ferrying migrants into Calais by train and billeting them at two hotels managed by a gang member. A French court heard last month that two Algerian brothers – Tawfik Smahi, 29, and 25-year-old Mahdi Smahi – had worked with another man from their home town and a Syrian people smuggler to organise journeys by migrants to Calais from elsewhere in France and then run a taxi service to nearby beaches.
The brothers were sentenced to 36 months and two years’ imprisonment respectively after French police found thousands of euros in their bank accounts suspected of being linked to people smuggling. French sources said another innovation by the smuggling gangs has been to acquire increasingly powerful outboard engines used on the dinghies as they make the crossing, usually under cover of darkness, towards a stretch of the Kent coast from Dover to Dungeness. One French rescue worker said: “These more powerful motors mean the boats can get away [from any attempt to intercept them] and they are more likely to reach British waters.
Steven Martin, the director Channel Rescue, a UK-based volunteer organisation which monitors conditions nightly ahead of Channel crossings by small boats, said the larger size of these dinghies suggested gangs were trying to increase the numbers of migrants per crossing.
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