Smugglers Claim French Police Helping Illegals Get to UK

Migrants sit under the winter sun close to their make shift camp in the vicinity of the fo
PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/Getty Images
Victoria Friedman

A people smuggler has claimed French police are helping illegals plan their trips to the UK by telling them which days not to cross the English Channel, suggesting they are telling them when to avoid British border patrols.

Speaking from a tent in Dunkirk in France, people smuggler Farooq told an undercover reporter for LBC that his gang, which also operates out of London and Birmingham, charges £7,000 per person and has sent between 300 and 400 illegal aliens across the water.

He told the reporter, posing as an Indian migrant looking for illegal transit for him and his family, that his team will take them across the channel until they are in British territorial waters where the “UK police” will pick up the migrants. He explains the police will then “take you to a police station like for 24 hours”, then “send [them to] the hotel”, and after which “it’s finished”, implying that after the end of the ‘immigration’ process, they could go wherever they wanted “no problem”.

During the recorded negotiation for illegal travel to the UK, Farooq alleged that the French police help migrants by indicating which are good days to cross and which are not, explaining that on some occasions, “When you’re going to the beach… Police coming, the French police. Is told, ‘Today not possible. Today go, next day come.’”

The LBC reporter asked for clarification, saying, “Police say okay?” to which the people smuggler replied: “Sometimes, when people are going, the French police with him. When he’s crossed the border, after [they just say], ‘Bye bye’… I don’t know. Now, a lot of people pass. Like here, three-four hundred people pass.”

“French police is no problem. Police [in France] just give you the way,” he added, before claiming that if the migrants are picked up by French police, the police are “very good” and rather than taking them to jail let them go at the train station so that they can try again the next day.

The radio broadcaster passed the information to the government, with the Home Office saying it was launching an investigation.

This would not be the first time that French authorities were accused of failing to take responsibility for the migrants in their country. Last year, the Italian interior ministry, formerly under populist Matteo Salvini, claimed that French police were returning adult and minor migrants across the border to Italy. French police later confirmed that they had been transporting and depositing unwanted migrants across the border.

In 2003, the UK and France signed the Le Touquet accord, in which the countries have juxtaposed border controls in a number of ports, resulting in illegals being stopped before they manage to leave France and cross the English Channel.

French politicians have threatened to tear up Le Touquet, with Calais’s regional chief Javier Bertrand saying after the 2016 referendum that “The British people have chosen to take back their freedom, they must take back their borders” — despite the bilateral agreement being made independent of the EU — with the French government denying that illegals would ever be waved through to the UK.

Emmanuel Macron had also threatened to get rid of border checks during the 2017 French presidential election campaign, the notion criticised by National Rally candidate Marine Le Pen who warned of France becoming a transit country, overrun by illegals trying to get to the UK, saying instead that France should protect her external borders to stop illegals entering in the first place.

Former French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve also warned in 2015 that “calling for the border with the English to be opened” would “send a signal to people smugglers and would lead migrants to flow to Calais in far greater numbers”.

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