DUNKIRK: Five people in the northern France were sentenced to prison for smuggling up to six years and helping the migrants to reach northern France. It was a ring of two Frenchmen and three Kurds. They charged $10,100; 11,500 Euros for “guaranteed” passage across the Channel.
Thousands of migrants desperate to reach Britain, where many have family or community ties and see better hopes for work, have massed along the northern French coast in makeshift camps. All of the defendants were charged with belonging to an organized gang that helped with the illegal entry of migrants between August 2015 and this February.
The ring’s leader, an Iranian Kurd known as “Kapa” who is still on the run, got the heaviest sentence at six years and a 50,000-euro fine in the Dunkirk court. An international warrant has been issued by the authorities to arrest him.
Two other Kurds, (One Iranian and one Iraqi) were jailed for two years each. They were responsible for finding migrants and bringing them to an assigned highway rest area in Dunkirk for transport.
Two Frenchmen who ran a cafe in Dunkirk and provided logistic support to the ring were also sentenced. One of them was given a year behind bars and the other was put for two years, while a cab driver accused of transporting migrants was acquitted.
The ring, which operated around the Grande-Synthe camp near Dunkirk, was broken up in mid-February by border police. At the start of March, the squalid camp was home to close to 1,500 people, many of whom were Kurds.
Last month authorities reported a sharp increase in migrant attempts to put away in the back of Lorries and then board ferries or shuttle trains to England.
French police unions said they feared the rise heralds a difficult summer as the flow of migrants into Europe begins to pick up again.