Scandal of child drug slaves recruited from care homes
County lines thugs lure 25 from under noses of teachers and social workers
SOCIAL workers and teachers were facing serious questions last night after a county lines gang plucked 25 boys and girls from care homes and units for expelled pupils to sell drugs 70 miles away.
Drug dealers infiltrated at least three care homes and four pupil referral units (PRU) to recruit vulnerable teenagers as young as 14 from under the noses of staff.
No one noticed when the youngsters – who were dubbed ‘perfect couriers’ – disappeared for days after they were sent from London to peddle drugs in Portsmouth, making profits of up to £2,000 per child each day for gangmasters.
The children barely received a penny and were forced into submission through threats to their life or their families.
It was not until 15 of the teenagers from three London boroughs had been arrested for possession of drugs on the South Coast that a children’s worker raised the alarm – sparking Britain’s first county lines police investigation into modern slavery.
Today the three ruthless criminals at the heart of the scandal face jail when they are sentenced at Inner London Crown Court for trafficking six teenagers. The astonishing case illustrates how pupils excluded from schools and youngsters in the care system are being exploited by gangs.
The National Crime Agency estimates that 10,000 children as young as 11 have been enslaved by 2,000 county lines gangs – named after the mobile phone lines they use to transfer drugs from big cities to the provinces. The number of drug- dealing operations has almost tripled from 720 last year to around 2,000, with teenagers aged 15 to 17 making up most members of the gangs in the £500million industry.
Yesterday the Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield said: ‘ These children are too readily able to disappear from view – missed by the system that shouldn’t miss them. They are, in the minds of these drug gangs, the least important, most disposable and replaceable links in the entire criminal chain. Much more needs to be done to ensure our vulnerable children are not missed, are supported, and can’t just vanish from view only to surface in police cells and the courts.’
The five-year investigation into the landmark case began in 2014 when a succession of children aged 14 to 16 from Lewisham, Croydon and Bromley were found wandering the streets of Portsmouth selling crackcocaine and heroin at all hours.
Initially, the teenagers were treated as criminals and prosecuted. But gradually detectives realised that they were vulnerable victims lured with the promise of earning £600 a day. In some instances, the teenagers had only been recruited 48 hours earlier at their PRU before being put on a train to Portsmouth carrying bundles of drugs worth £3,000.
In one case, two 15-year-old boys lured from the same unit worked alongside each other, taking turns to sell drugs and re-stock the line.
Some of the children were threatened with violence if they did not comply. A 15-year-old girl from a PRU was held hostage for two days and told her grandmother would be hurt if she refused to go to Portsmouth. A 19-year-old autistic boy from a hostel was forced to work on Christmas Day delivering drugs for the gang.
When he tried to escape, he was kidnapped, stripped naked and had a gun shoved in his mouth.
Police believe 25 child couriers were made to work for three county lines. They said this was the first investigation to treat children caught selling drugs as victims rather than criminals.
The ringleaders, Dean Alford, Michael Karemera, and Glodi Wabelua, all 25, from Lewisham, boasted about their exploits in drill rap music videos.
The trio were first arrested in September 2014 after police launched a major operation involving at least 250 officers. But it took years to bring them to justice after their trial collapsed due to an incorrect interpretation of the law. Scotland Yard took the case to the Court of Appeal and last month the trio were finally convicted at Inner London Crown Court.
Officers believe at least 25 children were enslaved between November 2013 and September 2014. But they only took six cases to court involving three girls aged 14, 15 and 16 and three boys aged 15, 16 and 19 because the case would have been too unwieldy to prosecute if they included all of the victims.
Kate Bex, QC, prosecuting, told jurors: ‘You have heard evidence that children make perfect couriers because they do what you want, they are less likely to steal
the drugs or money, less likely to be stopped and searched on trains. It is pretty brutal.’
Alford and Karemera admitted human trafficking for exploitation but Wabelua was convicted by the jury. Youngsters targeted were too scared to give evidence in the case, and the 19year-old threatened at gunpoint had to be given a new identity. Police relied on DNA and phone evidence to show how the crooks used their child army to serve hundreds of drug users demanding crack cocaine and heroin at all hours.
The trio were first convicted for drug supply in February 2016 but the trafficking element of the case was tried separately. Alford was sentenced to 11 years and Karemera to 10 years for the drug charges alone. Wabelua received a sentence of six years and eight months.
But today they will get additional sentences for people trafficking. Acting Detective Inspector Simon French said: ‘It was a landmark case. We approached the young people as victims.’