Two Kurdish people smugglers plead guilty in British court

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Two Kurds hailing from Iraq and Iran have pleaded guilty to people smuggling charges, Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) said on Friday.

Dilshad Shamo, 41 from Iraq, and Ali Khdir, 40 from Iran, ran a people smuggling ring out of the Welsh town of Caerphilly, the NCA said.

They were first arrested in April of last year and were charged in February with “offences of facilitation of migrants through Europe,” the NCA said. 

Their trial in Cardiff began on November 11 and they pleaded guilty to all offences after “after hearing ten days of evidence against them,” according to the crime agency.

Both were UK citizens, according to Sky News. 

The pair “used messaging and social media apps to provide videos from people who had already taken the journey so they could advertise their routes,” the British crime agency said, publishing a video from December 2022 in which a man purportedly thanks his smuggler while being transported by lorry. 

Kurdish criminal groups control the increasingly lucrative cross-Channel migration routes, according to the NCA, which said in its 2023 assessment that the groups are mainly based in northern Europe.

A spokesperson for the NCA press office told Rudaw earlier this month that the UK is collaborating with the Kurdistan Region to combat “organised immigration crime.”

Every year, tens of thousands of people from Iraq and the Kurdistan Region seek to escape endless crises of lack of employment, political instability, and corruption by joining thousands of others from scores of countries taking perilous routes to Europe. The UK is a popular destination for many people, but crossing the English Channel is dangerous and can be deadly.