The ‘Merchants of Death’ trial intensifies the fight against Channel smugglers

The French judge peered over her glasses and looked sternly across the cavernous underground courtroom at a notorious figure sitting in a glass cage.

“There will be no more misconduct. No more threats. Is that understood?” asked Arabelle Bouts, the chief judge of a European human trafficking trial so extensive that it generated 67 tons of paperwork.

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

Mr Rasoul, who had already been convicted on previous smuggling charges and was serving a separate eight-year prison 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 police officers.

Standing next to the judge, the lead prosecutor, Julie Carros, leaned into her microphone, looked at her notes and began laying out her final arguments in a sprawling case involving a total of 33 alleged members of a Kurdish smuggling ring. accused of being responsible for the bulk of migrants crossing the Channel in small boats between 2020 and 2022.

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

“This is a tentacle-like case … involving merchants of death,” Ms. Carros said, describing how the gang had overloaded the small boats, sometimes carrying as many as 15 times more people than the boats were designed for .

The result, she said, was a ‘phenomenal’ profit margin for the gangs, who could earn up to £60,000 for every boat launched, with roughly half of those boats reaching British waters, providing an income for the gang of €3.5 million ($3.8 million; £2.9 million) per year.

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

A total of seventeen men and one woman are now on trial, twelve have previously been found guilty and three more will be tried next year.

As Ms. Carros laid out the prosecution’s case against each of the suspects, at least two family members sitting in the courtroom expressed disappointment at the lengthy sentences sought. The trial is expected to end in early November.

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

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

But will this massive trial and the prospect of stiff penalties act as a serious deterrent to a smuggling industry that, in terms of the sheer number of successful small boat crossings, has continued to flourish in the years since these arrests?

Prosecutors directly involved in this trial were unwilling to speak to the BBC, but Pascal Marconville, chief prosecutor at the regional appeal court for northern France, suggested the long sentences were part of a wider strategy to reduce costs of human smuggling. the gangs and their clients.

“The action of the French police, with the support of investigating judges, is intended 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 developed in recent years from informal groups supporting their own countrymen into “networks organized like drug gangs”.

He then outlined a fragmented network with different ‘sectors’ focusing on separate parts of the smuggling industry.

‘It’s like chess, and that’s what they did [the advantage] on the plate. So they are always one step ahead of us. We need to adapt and understand how to counter these networks. We have struggled with the leaders because when they are arrested and imprisoned, they still manage to run their networks from within,” he said.

Despite the difficulties for law enforcement officers working in different countries and, for example, different laws regarding bail and evidence standards, Mr Marconville praised the cooperation between French and British officials and said Britain was “very willing to come up with solutions to improve cooperation ”.

The Germans, on the other hand, “who we always consider very efficient people, do not make it any easier [for us]” he noted.

But one of the lawyers involved in the case downplayed its broader impact on the small boat crisis.

“The penalties are now becoming much heavier. That’s clear. And I think they will continue to strengthen them. Unfortunately… I’m pessimistic because I don’t think it will stop… because in this one [smuggling] In circles, people only think about money,” said Kamal Abbas.

Mr Abbas, defending a man accused of acting as a decoy driver for smugglers’ convoys, explained how three of the suspects in the trial, who were released on bail last year after two years in custody, were shortly afterwards reinstated in Belgium arrested. smuggling charges.

“Nothing discourages them… they see jail time as just another bump in the road,” he said.

After more than a decade of involvement in smuggling trials, Abbas once again became concerned about its consequences.

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