Police have carried out dawn raids in several cities in Germany and France in an internationally coordinated operation to smash a network accused of smuggling migrants to Britain in small boats.
Coordinated with Europol, the French security service and British police after months of intelligence-gathering, the raids on Wednesday concentrated on western German cities where gangs are believed to have procured small boats and found migrants wanting to be taken to the UK from France across the English Channel.
A network of Iraqi Kurds, some of whom are believed to be living in asylum seeker shelters in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) is accused of “smuggling… irregular migrants from the Middle East and East Africa to France and the UK using small, inflatable boats”, Germany’s federal police said in a statement.
More than 500 officers took part in the operation, which was connected to 10 international arrest warrants, in locations ranging from asylum seeker shelters to private homes and warehouses in cities including Essen, Bochum, Gelsenkirchen in NRW and the southern state of Baden-Württemberg, as well as others in France. The arrest warrants had been issued by a court in the French city of Lille, German police said.
Of particular focus was an asylum seekers’ shelter in Essen, which was surrounded by armed police early on Wednesday, according to the tabloid Bild, which had reporters on the scene.
Members of the German anti-terrorist special forces unit GSG 9 led the raids, assisted by more than 20 French and British investigators, and officials from the European Union’s law enforcement agency Europol. British and French police were reportedly on the ground during the operation in Germany.
In February, 19 people were arrested after raids targeted another Iraqi-Kurdish smuggling network after an investigation by Belgian, French and German authorities. According to investigators, new smuggling gangs are constantly emerging.
One investigator told German media that people-smuggling operations were often more lucrative than drug-dealing.
“It is sometimes possible to earn more money with human smuggling than with international drug dealing. Individual Syrians are paying up to €10,000 to be smuggled. A packed dinghy can quickly amount to several hundreds of thousands of euros. The lives of the migrants is of no importance to the criminals,” he said.
The suspects in the February raid were all based in Germany, but had bought inflatable dinghies intended for the smuggling of migrants to Britain from beaches near the French port city of Calais.
Small boat smuggling of migrants via France into Britain has been increasing since 2019. Last year, an estimated 30,000 migrants in 600 boats reached the UK, according to Europol, in just under 8,000 documented cases of human smuggling.
This marked an increase of more than 60% compared with 2022, and the highest level of smuggling since the height of the refugee crisis of 2016. German federal police said they had launched investigations into 4,400 human smuggling suspects.
On Wednesday, the French navy rescued 85 migrants on Wednesday after a vessel hit a sandbank off the Pas-de-Calais region.
Germany has increasingly found itself in the spotlight over small boat smuggling. A recent investigation by the BBC exposed the crucial connection Germany has played for smuggling gangs trying to get migrants across the Channel.
German politicians are under severe pressure to reduce the level of so-called illegal migration into Germany, which is one of the major issues ahead of snap elections due to be held in February, and is a hot-button issue for the far left and far right.
The recent intensification of the conflict in Syria has raised concerns that human smugglers will further seek to exploit Syrians who once again are being forced to flee to safer locations, and thus increase migration levels still further.
