My week at the Channel smuggler trial that exposed their tactics
A few weeks after a dinghy overfilled with migrants sank in the English Channel, with the loss of up to eight lives, one of those accused of sending them to their deaths was bemoaning his own fate to his cousin.
'I was owed €1,200 in this case, but I only received €150,' Khaled Maiwand complained, as they chatted on the phone. 'It made me sad when I took the money, but it wasn't my fault.
'I wasn't guilty. I just went with them and helped them. It was the people at the head of the network who I work with that did everything.'
The exchange was one of several that were read back by the judge to Maiwand, a 25-year-old Afghan with a mop of curly hair and bushy beard, as he stood sheepishly in a basement courtroom last week alongside eight other alleged people-smugglers.
They face multiple charges, including manslaughter, for which the prosecutor has demanded sentences of six to eight years.
The trial in the northern French city of Lille centres on the early hours of December 14, 2022, when the flimsy dinghy thought to be carrying 47 people — more than three times the number it was built to take — sank in freezing water.
Four people, not all of whom have been identified, died. Another four were never found. Survivors reported that one of the boat's air chambers had already burst before they set off.
The proceedings have provided a fascinating insight into the working of groups, mainly made up of Afghans and others from the Middle East, responsible for smuggling as many as 16,000 people across the Channel so far this year, and presenting yet another small boats headache for the British government.
The size and complexity of the investigation has also shown the time and resources needed to 'smash' the gangs, long Sir Keir Starmer's preferred method of dealing with one of the most intractable problems the government faces.
• Starmer urged to consider one-in, one-out migrant exchange scheme
It came as French authorities — under pressure from Britain to stem the flow of refugees — revealed that they plan to change the rules finally to allow their forces to stop migrants at sea, up to 300 metres from the coast.
The judge and her two colleagues will announce their verdict on June 30.
The police operation began with the smugglers' phones and geo-locations that 'showed the position of the people using them', said Dorothée Assaga, the lawyer for Shoaib Shinwari, a fellow Afghan also among the accused.
The alleged smugglers used their phones constantly to speak to and message each other, and also to liaise with migrants, known in their slang as 'chickens' and to arrange their 'games' (trips across the Channel), in return for payments, dubbed 'okays', which in this case ranged from €1,500 to €4,000.
The accused, all Afghan and Kurdish men aged 21 to 40, also often recorded their exploits in photographs and videos shared on social media.
They did not realise they were creating a trove of material that could eventually be used as a basis for tracking them down and building a case against them.
'For example, they thought that when they deleted a picture, it would disappear,' said Assaga. 'They didn't understand it would continue to exist somewhere.'
Working in conjunction with their British counterparts, French investigators quickly realised the key to finding the perpetrators lay in their phone records.
Their goal was to find numbers that had been used both on the afternoon of December 13 at Loon-Plage, seven miles west of Dunkirk, where the migrants were camped out, and then again between 10pm and 2am, another 35 miles or so further west in Ambleteuse and Wimereux, where they had gathered in the woods before setting off on their ill-fated voyage.
Initial results produced three phones, one of which belonged to Maiwand, who was arrested in March 2023 at the hostel in Cherbourg where he lived.
By tracing the numbers that he and the other two dialled, the investigators managed over the course of several months to round up the remaining accused, several of whom were by then far from the northern French coast.
One, Toryali Walizai, the alleged ringleader, is still at large, and believed to be in Serbia. Another Afghan, thought to have been his deputy, is to go on trial separately in Belgium.
Those in court in Lille were merely the 'petites mains' — 'the little hands' — according to Assaga. Shinwari, 21, her client, who is also accused of manslaughter, refused to accept he was responsible for the deaths, given that he had driven the migrants only as far as the woods where they initially hid, rather than on to the beach itself, she said.
Prosecutors have nevertheless demanded one of the tougher sentences — seven years — because he is accused of taking part in further smuggling operations the following autumn.
Yet their carefully delineated roles — whether, like Shinwari as drivers, or as logisticians or as a saraf, the one who collects and launders the money paid by migrants — were crucial to a massive illegal enterprise stretching from the Channel to the Middle East and beyond. One such saraf among the accused is alleged to have handled payments of more than €800,000 (£690,000) in just over a year.
Maiwand appears typical of many young men who begin their long journeys to Britain and other European countries as migrants — whether escaping persecution or simply searching for a better life — but then end up as members of the gangs that transport their compatriots.
After leaving Afghanistan when he was still underage, Maiwand headed for Germany, where his request for asylum was denied. He then moved to France, where he spent at least two years sleeping rough, and attempted to take a small boat across the Channel at least twice.
By the time of the disaster, he had somehow obtained a French residence permit. Paid €700 each month in social security, he is not thought to have done any legitimate work.
In an impassioned final statement to the court, he denied having received any money from smuggling, insisting that he wanted only to help people. 'I am really upset by what happened,' he said. 'I have no responsibility for it.'
But his — and the others' — varying degrees of contrition appeared at odds with the matter-of-fact way in which they discussed the disaster in telephone conversations and messages played to the court.
'Like the others, he does not consider himself as a trafficker, but instead as someone who helps the traffickers. It is a big psychological difference for them,' Maiwand's lawyer, Kamel Abbas, told me earlier during a pause in proceedings.
'They think that if you are a smuggler, then you are a gangster, you take advantage of death, you make a living with it, you get rich with it,' he added. 'They admit that they cook, carry the cans of petrol, show the migrants the way and drive the vehicles, but that's all, and it's only so they can get to England.'
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The charges — which also include membership of an organised band — are not the only crimes of which the men are accused. Shinwari, for example, faces another trial over his alleged participation in the gang rape of an underage male migrant.
A photograph of him, taken from social media, apparently showing him committing the crime, was flashed up briefly on a screen.
Asked by the judge, Marie Compère, to talk about his life, Shinwari described himself as a loving husband and father of three. This did not prevent him from also being a rapist, Compère told him. In France, she added, with the air of a teacher giving a civics lesson, you can 'love whom you like' — man or woman — but when you assault or rape them, you 'transform them into an object'.
In the more than two and a half years since the disaster, close to 90,000 migrants are thought to have successfully crossed the Channel — while growing numbers lost their lives during the attempt: a record 73 migrants are confirmed to have died last year, five times more than in 2023, according to Oxford University's Migration Observatory.
In the meantime, the methods of Channel crossing have changed.
Under the current French rules, police and gendarmes are unable to intervene once the migrants are in the water — leading to a number of recent embarrassing incidents in which officers have been filmed watching as boats overladen with migrantsput to sea in front of them.
Under the planned new '300-metre' rule, confirmed by the interior ministry and expected to be announced at Starmer's summit next month with President Macron, this would change.
Yet French officers who will have to implement the new rules appear sceptical that the change will provide the instant solution the two leaders are hoping for.
'Who is going to intervene? We are talking about 200km of coast here,' said Marc Musiol, a representative for the Unité police union for the coastal area including Calais and Dunkirk, who told me he and his colleagues had only learnt of the plan from the media.
Police and other law enforcement agencies have few suitable boats, and will have to be given both proper training and new operating procedures, he said. And even then, intervening once a boat is at sea could end in disaster.
'The migrants panic so much at the sight of police, that even just five metres from the beach someone could drown or a baby could be crushed underfoot on the boat.'
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