Amateur pilot who f lew an asylum seeker to UK is jailed
... but Syrian he smuggled in is now working in a Bournemouth hotel!
A PILOT who smuggled a Syrian refugee into Britain in a private plane has been jailed – while his passenger has been granted asylum and now works as a hotel manager.
Ammar Khalifa, an amateur pilot, illegally flew Ebrahim Hamad to the UK from France after they met in a cafe there.
Khalifa, 49 – a British citizen who is also originally from Syria – stopped the plane on the runway at Bournemouth Airport in Dorset to allow his passenger to get off before they reached immigration control.
But officials spotted Mr Hamad leaving the plane and later found him hiding inside Khalifa’s Mercedes M Class car.
Khalifa, who was said to have acted out of humanitarian concern after 18 members of his own family were killed in the Syrian conflict, has now been jailed for three and a half years for assisting unlawful immigration.
But Mr Hamad was later granted political asylum for five years and has now found work as an assistant hotel manager in Bournemouth. After the five years, he can apply to settle permanently in the UK.
Britain has said it will accept 20,000 ‘vulnerable’ Syrian refugees by the end of the decade but only after they undergo security checks, and the case highlights the threat of prosecution against Britons who attempt to help Syrians circumvent that process. Mr Hamad feared he would be killed in Syria if he refused to fight for government forces or to join the rebels against the regime of president Bashar al-Assad.
He fled the country last year and travelled through Turkey and Greece to France, where he met Khalifa at a cafe in Cherbourg in January. Bournemouth Crown Court heard that Khalifa, who was not paid to help Mr Hamad, then borrowed the private plane from a relative to fly him to Bournemouth from Cherbourg airport.
Sentencing him, Judge Peter Johnson said Khalifa had come up with ‘ a carefully thought-out plan’ to smuggle Mr Hamad into Britain, adding: ‘ You brought in someone you knew had no right to residence in this country. It is essential we maintain control of our borders and your actions deliberately circumvented those controls.
‘Your role was pivotal, without you this enterprise simply wouldn’t have taken place, and such offences attract severe sentences.’
Khalifa came to the UK from Syria in the 1980s to study English and became a British citizen, the court heard.
The unemployed father lives near Christchurch, in Dorset, with his wife, their two daughters and his three stepchildren, and
‘One-off attempt to help a former countryman’
has not returned to Syria since 1989. During his trial, Khalifa denied the offence and claimed Mr Hamad had said he wanted to visit a sick relative in Britain, and had shown him a French ID card.
It was only when they were 20 minutes from landing that Mr Hamad told him he was travelling to Britain illegally, it was claimed.
Khalifa’s lawyer Leslie Smith said his client now accepted he had acted wrongly but said the episode was a ‘one-off’ attempt to help a former countryman.
He said: ‘Mr Khalifa has said, “I put my hands up, I have done something wrong, I have neglected my duties as a UK citizen”.
‘Mr Khalifa has lost 18 family members in Syria since the conflict began, the youngest was 16.’ He added: ‘Mr Hamad left Syria because he didn’t want to kill anyone. He said if he didn’t join the government forces under conscription he would be killed and if he didn’t join the anti-government forces he would be killed.
‘There is not one suggestion that this was anything other than a humanitarian need to bring this man into the country.’