UK news outlet Dailymail revealed that an Albanian human trafficker was making up to 1 million pounds a week by smuggling immigrants into the UK. As the piece reports, UK MPs demanded urgent action to ‘crush’ people smuggling networks making millions of pounds out of dangerous Channel crossings.
More than 32,000 migrants have crossed the Channel in small boats and dinghies so far this year – more than made it through the whole of 2021.
Albanians accounted for about 60% of summer arrivals. Crossing by dinghies is extremely dangerous and sometimes fatal. Last November a boat carrying 27 migrants – many of them children – drowned when a dinghy capsized off Calais.
More tragedies were recorded in September 2022, when dozens of migrants were swept from the sea off Kent after a boat capsized. Just last week, a boat capsized off Calais with 57 people on board, mostly Albanian migrants, including 17 children, two of whom were babies.
From dailymail:
Their calls came after an undercover investigation in Monday’s Daily Mail exposed an Albanian gangster openly running the vile trade in Dunkirk.
Nicknamed the ‘Golden Lion’, he makes an estimated £1million a week sending migrants to Britain on flimsy dinghies.
He told reporters posing as customers that he could take them for £4,500 each and promised that the British authorities would give them food, blankets, and everything they needed before putting them up in a hotel. ‘After that, you can go where you want,’ he said.
His is just one of a string of highly organised trafficking gangs we found in northern France – one of which has 600 people on a waiting list for places on small boats.
more at dailymail.co.uk