IT’S THE LUCK OF THE DRAW
How laughing people smuggler sickeningly dismissed fate of the 39 tragic lorry migrants
A PEOPLE smuggler has laughed off the fate of the 39 migrants found dead in a shipping container, saying: ‘It is the luck of the draw.’
The British-based trafficker made the cruel comment as he offered to sneak an undercover reporter into the UK using the same route which ended in such tragedy last week.
Separately, Maurice Robinson, the 25-year-old lorry driver who went to collect the container, was last night charged with 39 counts of manslaughter and conspiracy to traffic people. In other developments yesterday:
It emerged that up to 25 of the victims could be from Vietnam;
The father of a 26-year-old woman who sent a string of desperate text messages as she ran out of air spoke
of his anguish at the ordeal she suffered;
Distraught relatives said some of the victims were planning to work in nail bars in the UK – an industry that has been linked to modern slavery;
It was suggested that the container was part of a convoy of three lorries carrying more than 100 migrants between them;
A second lorry driver, also in his 20s, was arrested in Dublin in connection with the deaths.
Just hours after news of the appalling discovery of the bodies last week, our reporters discovered that a UK-based Albanian using the pseudonym ‘Kace Kace’ was offering to help smuggle migrants into the country.
The Mail on Sunday has established that he is, in fact, called Kastrijot Ahmati and l i ves in Walthamstow, North East London. He claims to have been illegally smuggled into the UK in the back of a lorry himself.
Ahmati advertised his services and posted his mobile number on a Facebook page called ‘Albanians in London’, which has more than 16,000 followers.
When an undercover reporter contacted him, he told her she could pay £17,000 for ‘fake papers’ that would allow her to fly from the Albanian capital, Tirana.
Alternatively, she could pay £14,000 to be stowed away in the back of a lorry from Belgium – the origin of the container in which the 39 people died last week.
Speaking on Friday, just two days after the grim discovery at Waterglade Industrial Park in Grays, Essex, Ahmati told the undercover reporter that the trip from Belgium can take between 12 and 16 hours, depending on whether ‘the ferry is delayed’.
‘I have done it myself,’ he said. ‘I am trying to find you the easiest way, do you understand?’
The reporter claimed she wanted to t ravel with another family member, but she was told they would have to be smuggled with other migrants otherwise t he people trafficking gang would makes ‘no profit’.
She would pay on arrival in the UK, but Ahmati demanded the details of a friend in London who would guarantee the money.
When the reporter said she was ‘ scared’ because of last week’s tragedy, the trafficker replied: ‘It is the luck of the draw. That is how we all came.’
When she continued to voice her fears, saying, ‘We will die’, Ahmati simply laughed.
The trafficker is believed to be from Has, a district in northern Albania, from which hundreds of migrants are thought to have left for the UK. It is not known how long he has lived in Britain, although Facebook posts suggest he has been here since at least September 2018.
Earlier this month, he posted a video of himself smoking a cigarette and strolling around outside a London train station.
When approached for comment last night, Ahmati answered the phone and confirmed he was in the UK. Speaking via a friend, he claimed he had been ‘joking’ in the messages posted online and during the telephone call. In response to a
‘They peddle a myth about the UK’
WhatsApp message asking him to explain his actions, he replied ‘why’. His ‘Kace Kace’ Facebook account was taken down shortly afterwards.
Our investigation found Ahmati was one of four agents using the ‘ Albanians in London’ Facebook page to help migrants smuggle their way into the UK.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) last year said Albanian gangs operating at the ‘ higher end of sophistication’ were largely responsible for the surge in migrants being smuggled into the UK.
The total number of known victims of modern slavery and trafficking rocketed by 80 per cent between 2016 and 2018 to 6,993, according to NCA figures. The victims came from 130 countries with the most foreign nationals – 1,625 – coming from Albania.
Last night David Wood, former director- general of immigration enforcement at the Home Office, explained how Albanian traffickers operated: ‘What tends to happen is the groups have agents in source countries. That will include China, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sub- Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent. ‘These agents will be peddling the mythical, “Get to the UK, it’s the land of milk and honey”.’
Last night our dossier of material, including Ahmati’s identity, was made available to the Metropolitan Police. A force spokesman said any relevant information would be passed to investigating officers.
DO you feel ten per cent more hateful than you did this time last year? Do you think the British public as a whole are ten per cent more unpleasant in 2019 as compared to 2018?
If you believe the latest ‘ hate crimes’ stats, then you may come to such a ludicrous conclusion.
Figures compiled by the Home Office claim t hat t here were 103,379 hate crimes committed last year. A record number, and up ten per cent on the year before. Various campaign groups disguised as charities insist that this is merely ‘the tip of the iceberg’.
To which one might say simply: ‘Of course they do.’ For if you are sane and reasonable you will realise that all of this is nonsense – nonsense, in fact, of the purest, most disgraceful kind: professional nonsense, cooked up to serve a political purpose.
It is time that purpose was identified and named.
The foundations of the hate crime hoax started 20 years ago with the Macpherson Report on the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence. As well as its good effects, that inquiry had a number of negative consequences. Two stand out. The first was that an offence against a person of sexual or ethnic minority became a crime of greater seriousness than a crime against someone of no minority group.
So if an old woman was hit over the head for her purse, that was just a crime. But if someone who was gay or black was hit over the head then that was not just a crime but a hate crime. A two-tier system of offence was created in which some crimes ( with an identical effect upon t he victim) were deemed worse than others.
But the second development was more damaging, still: Macpherson stated that a crime was a hate crime if it was ‘perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by malice or ill- will towards a social group’.
So if I get hit over the head I might be the victim of a bog-standard crime. But if I am hit over the head and think, or pretend to think, that it is because of my homosexuality, then we are in the realm not just of crime but of hate crime. And that means the sirens of the modern police force can really go off.
In the years since the Macpherson Report, the British police have done everything they can to prove that they are on the beat with this new orthodoxy.
They don’t just want to find hate crimes. They need to find hate crimes. Some years ago a friend of mine was accosted on a train late at night by a couple of rowdy drunks. Reporting the matter to police at the next station, the officers positively begged him to report it (once they found out he was gay) as a ‘hate crime’. He insisted that there was no such element to their abuse. The police seemed desperate to persuade him otherwise.
That is just one of the reasons why the statistics on hate crimes keep going up and up. The police want them. They want to be able to report them. They positively advertise for them.
In case anyone thinks that is an exaggeration, consider the pathetic video released by DCC Julie Cooke of Cheshire Constabulary. It took the form of an online message for ‘pronoun day’, which she described as ‘ a day which is particularly important to people who identify as transgender or gender non-conforming’. Cooke wittered on: ‘Being misgendered can have a huge impact on somebody and their personal well-being. It can also be used as a form of abuse.’
And here is one of the problems of this form of touting for business. The Home Office’s statistics claim that, in the past year, ‘transphobic hate crimes’ rose by 37 per cent.
That is a pretty horrific number – like all the other rising hate crimes numbers. Until you dig one centimetre beneath the surface. What exactly constitutes a transphobic hate crime? Murder? Mugging? Burglary? Well, once again we have to remember that these crimes are in the eye of the beholder. And consider just one such beholder from only a few days ago.
Ria Cooper is a glamour model based in Hull, who ten years ago (at the age of 15) became Britain’s youngest transgender woman. Other than that, there is no reason why the nation at large should have heard of her. Except that earlier this month it emerged that Ms Cooper recently contacted Humberside Police to tell them of a set of WhatsApp messages she had received she was reporting as ‘ transphobic’. What were these messages? Well, they were from a p h o t o g r a p h e r wh o m C o o p e r accuses of trying to scupper her modelling career.
The photographer reportedly pointed out that Cooper has a penis, which was not the sort of lady he was after. Cooper calls this ‘f****** disgusting behaviour’ and deemed it ‘transphobic’. So there is another ‘hate crime’ just there.
Of course, campaigning groups long-ago cottoned on to the fact that all of this suits their interests. I suspct that sometimes that interest is commercial.
The remaining LGBT organisations in Britain have relatively little to do with their time. Their battles are largely won, and presumably their careers and pension plans are at risk from this success.
So ‘rising hate crimes’ must provide a massive business opportunity for these groups. Other groups also benefit from this marketplace of grievance.
Last month, when Parliament returned to spend a couple more days bi ckering about Brexit, Labour MPs used the opportunity to attack the Prime Minister. On what? Why hate crimes of course. The ridiculous, fulminating MPs kept pretending that Britain is in the midst of a hate crimewave and that the PM himself is responsible.
Labour MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi and others insisted that Boris’s column last year defending the right of Muslim women to wear the burka (a column his opponents deliberately misrepresented) in fact caused a ‘spike’ in anti-Muslim hate crimes. They claim that such hate crimes rose 375 per cent in the week after his column.
Which sounds impressive until you realise this is a rise from eight reported incidents in a week to 38 reported incidents. Scepticism has been poured on these figures.
Labour MPs who were attacking the Prime Minister with these bogus statistics were only using the favoured tactic of recent years.
For the fact is that since the Brexit vote there has been a huge number of ways in which people opposed to the result have assailed the British public.
We have been called stupid, ignorant, gullible and more. But perhaps the favourite claim of all has been the claim that the Brexit vote unleashed a tidal wave of hate in the British public. Anti-Brexit campaigners repeatedly pretended that the tragic murder of a Polish man called Arek Jozwik in Harlow in August 2016 was a result of the referendum. The resulting trial found that the murder was a squalid and mundane event with no link whatsoever to Brexit. But that is par for the course.
In the wake of the referendum there have been claims that British voters celebrated the result by a wave of hate crimes against ethnic and sexual minorities. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no country in the world more tolerant than this one. Yet time and again in the past 20 years – and never more so than since the referendum – we have been slandered and smeared.
Political campaigners have used bogus statistics to push their own political and sectarian interests. It is time that people named and shamed t he smear- merchants. There are bigots out there, as there are in every country. But this is not a bigoted country. And we have the right to vote how we want to vote without being defamed as such.
If there was one wave all sensible people should wish for in the near future it should be a wave of scepticism about the claims of campaigners whose only interest is in doing down this country.
A country which has justifiable pride in our tolerance and should exercise a healthy dose of scepticism towards our critics.
Police officers begged my friend to report incident as a hate crime Bogus statistics have been used to slander and to smear us time and again