The British gangsters cashing in

HIDDEN in a garage not far from the French ferry port of Calais are 20 cars with UK number plates. Among them is a new Jaguar which arrived only a few weeks ago. The address of the garage is a closely kept secret, its name known only to local police and the mayor of the small town of Teteghem, where a makeshift camp is a hub for illegal migrants from Iran, Iraq and Syria waiting to be smuggled across the Channel to England.

For all these cars have been confiscated in the past year by French police trying to disrupt the criminal people-traffickers who operate out of a lakeside camp 29 miles north of Calais.

To the French authorities, the garage is proof that many of the migrants being smuggled into Britain are helped by an English gang who make huge profits.

Teteghem’s mayor, Franck Dhersin, told me this week that he had come up with the idea of seizing traffickers’ cars to stop them driving migrants to England or to motorway rest areas near Teteghem where they are put on lorries going to the Calais and Dunkirk ferry ports.

‘This is a big criminal organisation and the traffickers at the camp have guns and knives. They get furious when the police lift their cars onto a transporter and take them away. But the officers have guns, too, and threaten to use them if the gang members are violent.

‘We take the vehicles to the garage seven miles away so the gang can’t find them or steal them back by force. We know their owners are from England because the cars all have English number plates.’

Teteghem first became a gathering point for migrants reaching northern France seven years ago, when a few set up tents by its lake. Soon the numbers had swollen into the hundreds and traffickers arrived to make a financial killing.

This week, the Mail visited Teteghem camp with 53-year-old Mayor Dhersin.

As we arrived, our car nearly collided at the entrance with a departing grey BMW with a typical UK number plate. Driven by two dark-haired young men, it screeched to a halt as the passengers — who spoke English well — called out to ask what we were doing.

When the mayor shouted that he was visiting ‘in his official capacity’, the BMW roared off fast towards the motorway.

In the camp were two Ford Focuses with British plates, as migrants crowded round us begging for help to reach England.

The migrants revealed how the traffickers charge them £1,500 each to be put on a lorry to the UK. The lorry drivers — often from eastern Europe and poorly paid — are bribed to hide migrants on board. Alternatively, the price to be hidden in a car to England driven by a traffickers’ agent who poses as a business traveller or holidaymaker, is £1,200 — cheaper, as there is more chance of getting caught.

The mayor explained that while most of the migrants massing in Calais port are penniless Africans who must ‘try their luck’ on lorries or trains each night, the migrants in Teteghem come from the Middle East and are sent funds from their families back home.

‘They can pay the traffickers to get them to England,’ he said. ‘They have many cousins waiting for them and your good economy means they can get a job on the black market.’

A few days ago armed police seized a Volkswagen Passat saloon from the Teteghem camp, he said. ‘We were not surprised it was from England, like the others before it,’ he added with a cynical smile.

The sophisticated trafficking operation is just one element of the crisis unfolding in northern France. There are others which the French authorities are finding rather less easy to blame on the British.

Down the coast in the port of Calais, the stories the migrants tell are heartbreaking but there is a growing air of anger and defiance. Some talk of having ‘rights’ to live in the UK or of wanting compensation after being pepper-sprayed or beaten with batons by French police this week.

THEy complain relentlessly, saying the official camp is not serving halal food (most of them are Muslim) and that they are given too little water. Above all, they say they hate France and do not want to stay there. One night this week, near the rail hub, I saw one young African man in his 20s climb through a hole in the wire, shouting at watching police officers: ‘Goodbye for ever! you won’t stop me going.’

Back at the Teteghem camp, our visit with the mayor took a sinister turn.

While the migrants chatted, up marched a man in a dark hoodie who spoke perfect English with a London accent. He demanded that we produce ‘ identity cards’. When I said I was an English journalist, he snarled: ‘ What are you doing here? I will rape you if you don’t go away.’

The mayor added defiantly: ‘This is my town. I can come here whenever I want.’ As the mystery man — whom the mayor says is a leader in the trafficking gang — watched us prepare to leave, I asked a 25-year- old Iraqi migrant, Adel, why he had come to Teteghem.

‘I heard about it on TV in Baghdad,’ he replied. ‘We all know that if we have money to pay, we can be smuggled into England. Everyone is told to come here.

‘Every time I get in a lorry, police sniffer dogs find me inside when I get to the port. I get thrown out, but I will keep on trying. I have paid £1,500 to an agent at the camp here. I do not have to pay again, however many times I try. That is the deal.’