How Britain’s FBI helped to nail smugglers whose greed led to disaster
THE people-traffickers behind Mitra Mehrad’s death were caught thanks to a painstaking two-month police investigation involving GPS tracking, phone bugging and hours of secret surveillance.
Between August 9, when the Iranian student died, and October 7 when Wakil Alizadeh and Ibrahima Kaba were arrested, French police and the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) amassed a wealth of evidence, including the pair’s organisation of six illegal crossings for 84 migrants that netted them an estimated £300,000.
Boulogne High Court heard that police, who hoped to catch higher ranking traffickers, decided to seize the men over fears that more lives would be lost from the ramshackle boats Alizadeh and Kaba sent into the Channel.
The trail to them started after the migrants who travelled with Mitra landed in the UK and the NCA, known as Britain’s FBI, checked their phones – discovering a number that they had contacted regularly.
The French authorities used GPS technology to track one of the phones, belonging to Alizadeh, and found he was making frequent journeys between migrant camps in Calais, a beach in Oye-Plage and the Parisian suburb of Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, where he lived. They bugged his phone and another belonging to Kaba.
The court heard how the pair would buy Zodiac inflatables from the website Bon Coin, the French equivalent of eBay. French police were able to find on the website the previous owner of the boat that Mitra travelled in.
The seller, who had no involvement in the trafficking, helped police to identify the boat as the one he had sold to Kaba.
Alizadeh was the brains of the operation and would negotiate prices with the migrants. At times, GPS tracking showed, he would cruise the migrant camps of the French coastline for business. On other occasions, he would be called directly from desperate migrants looking to strike a deal.
Recorded phone conversations showed Alizadeh and Kaba charged migrants €3,500 each for a place on a boat.
In one call on September 23, Alizadeh tells an unnamed associate: ‘Six migrants are on their way. The journey is going well – they’ll be in Dover soon.’
Later that day, six Iranian men were picked up and taken to Dover by Border Force officers.
At 2am on September 19, Alizadeh was recorded telling a migrant where to find the boat in Oye-Plage. Other calls have him haggling over prices with migrants. On August 27, a clearly panicked Alizadeh spots police close to where a boat is leaving. He tells a migrant on the phone: ‘Hurry! There are police here!’
Kaba was in charge of buying the boats and bringing them to Calais on his van. Alizadeh would tell the migrants where to find the boat and they would have to inflate it themselves, or he would help push them out to sea.
The court heard payments for the trips were transferred into UK
‘He’d cruise the camps looking for business’
and French bank accounts. On many occasions, Alizadeh spoke with British ‘interlocutors’ to plan the operations and with people in Britain – some described as ‘bankers’ – who oversaw the financial side of the evil trade.
On October 7, Kaba and Alizadeh were arrested at a toll booth in Fleury-en-Biere, 30 miles south of Paris, as they drove from Dijon to the capital. In the back of their van was a dinghy.
Last night, the NCA said that as part of the investigation into Mitra’s death, they had arrested a 31-year-old Iranian on September 21 in Coventry on suspicion of facilitating illegal immigration. He was questioned and released under investigation. Two Iranian nationals were also interviewed under caution by NCA officials.
Steve Reynolds, of the NCA, said: ‘We are committed to doing everything in our power to bring people-smugglers targeting the UK to justice and, through our close collaboration with French authorities, we continue to have an impact on them and their activity.’