Truck driver tried to smuggle in 16 migrants
A VAN driver caught smuggling 16 illegal immigrants into the UK has been jailed for more than five years.
Harbans Doll was trying to sneak three Iraqi families including a five-month-old baby and two Albanian women into Britain in the back of a hired Ford Transit van.
The 61-year-old told Border Force officials: ‘I thought I was just delivering furniture.’ The father of one claimed he had ‘met a man at a pub’ near his home in Langley, near Slough, and was offered £500 to collect a load from France. Officials stopped the van at the controls at the Channel Tunnel terminal in Coquelles – effectively the British border on French soil.
When they searched the vehicle they found it three-quarters full of beanbags and chairs with a double mattress stood upright part way inside the van. Hiding behind the mattress the officers found 16 people, including five children. Doll was taken to a police station in Folkestone but initially refused to answer questions about why he hired the van. He insisted he had simply been hired to collect furniture, adding: ‘I was shocked there were illegal immigrants in the back.’
Yesterday at Canterbury Crown Court he was sentenced to five and a half years in prison after admitting people smuggling.
David Fairclough, assistant director of the Border Force, said the group of migrants were handed over to French border police.
He added: ‘Although Doll offered no explanation for his behaviour, the judge considered in his sentencing that the motivation was financial.
‘Offences like this, where individuals take advantage of the desperation of others for personal gain, are among the worst that we deal with.’