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British national jailed in France for smuggling migrants
A French court has jailed an Afghan-born British minicab driver for six months for trying to smuggle an Afghan woman and her 13-year-old son into Britain in his car boot.
French police found them hiding under a blanket and suitcases in a new BMW 3 series driven by Matiullah Azmi, 30, and registered to the company that employed him, prosecutors said on Saturday. Azmi, said to be living in the London area, claimed the pair slipped into the car and hid without his knowledge.
However, the court in the Channel port of Boulogne-sur-Mer was told he had received a bank transfer of £1,000 shortly before his arrest, and his GPS showed he had visited the “Jungle” migrants’ camp in Calais. His car was also confiscated and he was banned from the Boulogne area for two years.
The French authorities arrested four men with British-registered cars and linked to UK addresses on Friday for smuggling migrants into Britain. More than 100 Britons have been jailed in France in the past 12 months for trying to smuggle migrants across the Channel into the UK, and the French authorities have confiscated more than 30 British-registered cars.
More details emerged on Saturday of a people-smuggling ring that brought 149 Albanians into Britain since February, charging each migrant up to £7,000. Six people -- four Albanians and two French women -- were charged with masterminding dozens of smuggling trips, 24 of which successfully landed 149 illegal immigrants in Britain. Attempts to smuggle in more than 100 others ended in failure, prosecutors said.
A Calais department store manager arrested with the six was released for lack of evidence, the deputy public prosecutor of Boulogne-sur-Mer, Nathalie Bany, said.
The arrest of the man, initially identified as a “senior Calais businessman”, had prompted Mike Hookem, a British MEP who was threatened with a gun in a migrant camp, to accuse of the French authorities of being in denial about the scale of the crisis. An Iraqi man in his twenties was injured by a shotgun blast in a migrants’ camp in Téteghem, near Dunkirk, on Friday night.
The man, whose life is not in danger, was admitted to hospital. The squalid camp is in the grip of people-smugglers, many of whom are believed to be British nationals.
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