A man suspected of being a major supplier of small boats used by smugglers to illegally convoy migrants to the United Kingdom, wanted by Belgium, was arrested on Wednesday May 4 in London, announced the British investigation services.
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Hewa Rahimpur, 29, from Iran but based in the UK, was arrested in east London early Wednesday afternoon, according to the UK Crime Agency (NCA) .
7,000 migrants since January
The Belgian authorities suspect him of being a head of a network presented by the prosecution as involved in offenses relating to "
systematic trafficking in human beings
" using small boats.
Compared to 2020, the number of these perilous Channel crossings tripled in 2021 (more than 28,000), a year marked by a shipwreck that left at least 27 dead.
A new record is expected in 2022: already more than 7,000 migrants have made the crossing since January, three times more than in 2021 at the same time, seven times more than in 2020.
“Some of the boats we saw attempting the Channel crossing were nothing less than death traps, held together with duct tape and planks of wood”
Andrea Wilson, Deputy Director for Organized Crime Immigration at the NCA
The joint investigation between the NCA and Belgium follows the discovery of several boats and outboard motors by Belgian police in the back of a vehicle at the Belgian-French border in October 2021. Suspect Hewa Rahimpur is accused of obtaining the boats in Turkey and having them delivered to Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, before having them transported by accomplices to the French coast.
He is due to appear in court at Westminter Magistrates Court in London on Thursday, where extradition proceedings are to begin.
“Avoid crossings”
"
Rahimpur is accused of being a major player in what we would call one of the largest criminal networks involved in supplying boats to smugglers
," NCA's Jacque Beer said in a statement.
“
Some of the boats we saw attempting to cross the English Channel were nothing less than death traps, held together with duct tape and planks of wood
,” added Andrea Wilson, deputy director for crime. organized in immigration at the NCA.
Describing this form of migrant smuggling as the "
ultimate threat to life
", Frank Demeester, from the Belgian prosecutor's office in West Flanders, stressed that "
every crossing that can be avoided is potentially a fatal crossing that is prevented
".
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Hoping to deter such crossings in one of the world's busiest straits, London recently reached a highly controversial agreement with Kigali to send asylum seekers who arrived illegally in the United Kingdom to Rwanda.