smuggler

A “prolific” people smuggler has been convicted after co-ordinating a £1.5m operation to transport migrants across the English Channel in small boats.

A man known as the “best smuggler”, who advertised small boat Channel crossings on Facebook, has been jailed for 17 years.

Another, thought to have been recorded in Iraq in 2021, showed Zada at a party with musicians singing a song in Kurdish praising him as "the best smuggler", saying "all the other smugglers have learned from him" while he throws cash at them and fires a gun into the air in celebration.

As part of our work to penetrate the Vietnamese operations, we met an experienced smuggler who is operating in the UK and forging documents for migrants seeking to reach Europe.

We had sought to draw the blonde Vietnamese smuggler, Tony, out of a nearby forest and onto more neutral territory, where his gang - possibly armed, as other gangs certainly are - might pose less of a threat to us.