Behind the facade of an innocuous little half-timbered farmhouse in the Osnabrück region in northeastern Germany, agents from the English National Crime Agency mingle with members of the German special forces. On the dusty brick floor, police forces lined up dozens of scarlet life jackets, deflated and folded inflatable boats and detached engines.
These are some of the seizures made on Tuesday July 5 during an international operation ” flawless ” aimed at dismantling a criminal network of illegal cross-border immigration orchestrating crossings of the Channel to the United Kingdom from the city of Calais.
“This is the largest international operation ever against small boat smugglers,” welcomed Jean-Philippe Decouffe, Executive Director of Europol. Conducted jointly by France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, and coordinated by Europol and Eurojust, the operation has already resulted in the arrest of 39 people, the seizure of nearly 1,200 rescue, 150 inflatable boats, 50 motors, weapons, drugs and several thousand euros in cash.
Arrests of network leaders
Ultra-structured, this Iraqi-Kurdish criminal network of «High level» benefited from a “very elaborate financial scheme and sprawling logistics allowing it to have control over the crossings of the Channel in inflatable motor boats” detailed Carole Étienne, public prosecutor of Lille.
The organization supervised both the transport of migrants to the beaches by drivers, the transport of Turkish or Chinese-made boats previously purchased online in Germany and the Netherlands, supervising the use of local accomplices – building owners, car salesmen – as well as the sea crossings themselves. According to information collected by the German daily The mirror90% of the equipment used to cross the English Channel comes from Germany.
Far from being satisfied with small hands, the operation allowed, for the first time, the arrest of “clients, organization executives and network heads”. Nine arrests were made in France, and six suspects were arrested in London, including a 26-year-old Iraqi-Kurdish man, considered a ” key element “ of the structure, according to Matt Rivers, regional director of investigations for the National Crime Agency (NCA) in the United Kingdom. In Germany, the operation led to the simultaneous arrest of 18 other members of the network. France has made extradition requests for two of them.
“A request that is in fact a need”
Over the past 18 months, the organization is suspected of smuggling up to 10,000 migrants from the Middle East. The price of the individual crossing being estimated between 2,500 to 3,500 €, the network would have generated around 15 million euros in turnover over the period. According to Matt Rivers, the network is responsible for approximately “10% of crossings over the last year”, a proportion that would give hope for a “decline in the number of crossings in the near future”.
On the side of associations helping exiles, the operation was welcomed without however generating the same optimism on a downward trend in attempts to cross. “It is very good that there are investigations, but that will not change the problem: as long as there are no legal ways to cross the borders, there will always be a parallel market for the crossings in order to respond to a demand which is in fact a need” reacts William Feuillard, coordinator of the Auberge des migrants intervening with exiles in Calais and the north of France, and for whom this type of operation actually comes down to “treating the symptoms of a problem rather than its cause”.
According to him, the only real way to deal with the problem at the source would be to “reform the totally dysfunctional European system linked to the Dublin regulation, which pushes people to take ever more risks”. And to conclude “If the smugglers’ boats are no longer available, they will find it for themselves. »