'Merchants of death' trial steps up fight against Channel smugglers

Peering over her glasses, the French judge glanced sternly across the cavernous underground courtroom towards a notorious figure seated in a glass cage.

“There will be no more misbehaviour. No more threats. Is that understood?" asked Arabelle Bouts, the lead judge of a Europe-wide people smuggling trial so vast that it has generated 67 tonnes of paperwork.

“Yes,” replied Mirkhan Rasoul, 26, calmly.

Mr Rasoul, already convicted on prior smuggling charges and serving a separate eight-year sentence for attempted murder, had interrupted proceedings a few days earlier by threatening two of the translators working in the courtroom. Now he was flanked by two armed policemen.

Standing near the judge, the lead prosecutor, Julie Carros, leant in towards her microphone, glanced down at her notes, and began to set out her final arguments in a sprawling case that involves a total of 33 alleged members of a Kurdish smuggling gang, accused of responsibility for the bulk of migrants crossing the Channel in small boats between 2020 and 2022.

While Mr Rasoul remained behind a glass screen, approximately 10 other accused sat in the open courtroom surrounded by another 15 armed policemen, who only removed the men’s handcuffs when the court was in session.

“This is a tentacle-like case... involving merchants of death,” said Ms Carros, describing how the gang had overloaded the small boats, sometimes cramming up to 15 times more people on board than the boats are designed to carry.

The result, she said, was a “phenomenal” profit margin for the gangs, who could make up to €60,000 ($65,000; £50,000) for each boat launched, with roughly half of those boats reaching UK waters, leading to an income for the gang of €3.5m ($3.8m; £2.9m) a year.

The gang itself was accused of controlling the lion’s share of all Channel crossings from the French coast – with its network delivering equipment from across Europe – until, in late 2021 and 2022, its members were arrested in France, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, as part of the largest international operation of its kind at the time against small-boat smugglers.

In all, 17 men and one woman are now on trial, 12 were found guilty earlier, and three more will be tried next year.

As Ms Carros set out the prosecution’s case against each of the accused, there were gasps of disappointment from at least two relatives seated in the courtroom, at the long sentences being demanded. The trial is expected to end in early November.

“We request a sentence of 15 years, a €200,000 fine and a permanent ban from French territory,” said Ms Carros in reference to Mirkhan Rasoul, who is accused of continuing to control the gang from a prison in central France.

“We found three mobile telephones in his cell,” she said, going on to describe an audio recording on which Mr Rasoul had boasted of the prison in Tours being “almost like a hotel… they searched the cell but never found my phones. The police are very kind”.

But will this huge trial, and the prospect of tough sentences, act as a serious deterrent for a smuggling industry that has, in terms of the sheer number of successful small boat crossings, continued to thrive in the years since these arrests?

The prosecutors directly involved in this trial were not willing to talk to the BBC, but Pascal Marconville, lead prosecutor at the regional Court of Appeal for northern France, suggested that the long sentences were part of a broader strategy to raise the cost of smuggling for the gangs and their customers.

“The action taken by French police, with the support of investigative judges, is designed not only to thwart their actions, but also to make such operations so expensive that they lose their appeal,” Mr Marconville told us.

He described how the gangs had evolved in recent years from informal groups supporting their own countrymen to “networks organised much like drug gangs”.

He went on to sketch out a fragmented network with different “sectors” focusing on separate parts of the smuggling industry.

“It’s like chess, and they have [the advantage] on the board. So they’re always one step ahead of us. We have to adapt and understand how we can counter these networks. We’ve struggled with the ringleaders because when they’re arrested and imprisoned they still manage to run their networks from inside,” he said.

Despite the difficulties for law enforcement officials working across different countries and, for instance, different laws related to bail and standards of evidence, Mr Marconville praised the collaboration between French and British officials, saying the UK was “very willing to come up with solutions to improve co-operation”.

The Germans, on the other hand “who we always think of as very efficient people, don’t make things easier [for us]”, he noted.

But one of the defence lawyers involved in this case played down its broader impact on the small boat crisis.

“The sentences are becoming much harsher now. That’s clear. And I think they will continue to toughen them. Unfortunately... I am pessimistic because I don’t think it will stop... because in these [smuggling] circles people think only about money,” said Kamal Abbas.

Mr Abbas, who is defending a man accused of acting as decoy driver for smugglers' convoys, explained how three of the accused in this trial, who were released on bail last year after two years in detention, were arrested soon afterwards in Belgium on fresh smuggling charges.

“Nothing discourages them... they see imprisonment as just another bump on the road,” he said.

After more than a decade involved in smuggling trials, Mr Abbas had another concern about their impact.

“[The real leaders] always escape. If their leader is Iraqi, he’s in Iraq. If he’s Iranian, he’ll be in Iran. But the link is often in England, I’m sure of that. The British authorities should look harder at certain areas of London if they want to stop this phenomenon,” said Mr Abbas.