As he wandered nonchalantly through a sunlit public square, the people smuggler tracked by the BBC appeared to have no idea he was being followed.
He was a short, stocky man of 39, wearing a pale green suit and a baseball cap: an ordinary person taking an evening stroll from a migrant reception centre to a nearby tram station.
Our team started running.
“We know who you are”I told him when we caught up with him in the middle of the square in the capital of Luxembourg.
“He is a human trafficker.”
That confrontation was the culmination of a BBC investigation that had begun 51 days earlier, hours after five people, including a seven-year-old girl named Sara, died at sea off the coast of northern France.
They suffocated under a multitude of bodies inside an inflatable boat.
This is the story of how we located it.
This investigation took us from the informal immigrant camps that form around the French cities of Calais and Boulogne, to a French police unit in Lille, passing through a city in the county of Essex, the Belgian port of Antwerp, Berlin, and finally to Luxembourgin addition to three days guarding the doors of the country’s immigrant reception center.
The man now in front of us (with his eyes half-closed, shoulders and hands raised and shrugging) He was, we knew for certain, the human trafficker. in charge of organizing Sara and her family’s dangerous trip to England.
“I swear it’s not me,” he repeatedly declared, as he retreated towards a tram station near the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.
But we had already seen his Iraqi passport and his Italian identity card. Moments after we began to confront him, The last piece of the puzzle fell into place: his phone started ringing in his pocket.
At first he ignored it, but when he finally pulled it out and saw the incoming call number on his screen, We had conclusive evidence of his guilt.
Because, why it was us who were calling him.
In the previous weeks, a member of our team the BBC had posed as an immigrant attempting to cross the English Channel to the United Kingdom.
After contacting several alleged intermediaries working within a broader migrant smuggling network, our colleague, “Mahmoud”, finally made direct contact with him.
Then We secretly recorded several telephone conversations with the trafficker, talking to him on the same cell phone he now had in his hand. In those calls she had confirmed his identity and told us that he was still in business.
An “easy trip” for $1,600 dollars
For a fee, he said, he could offer us “an easy ride” with “extra guards, all armed” on the next small boat out of northern France. The going rate was about $1,600.
As we stood before him now, we could see our phone number, clearly, on the screen of your cell phone.
We had found our man.
Our investigation began when we witnessed a desperate incident on the French coast on April 23rd.
We had been waiting, all night on a beach just outside the resort town of Wimereux, a place we knew was one of the favorite places for these boats to leave.
That’s when we recorded how a group of French police officers tried to stop the departure of one of these boats while the immigrants tried to jump onto the boat in which the traffickers were waiting.
The police were unable to prevent them from boarding and we witnessed the chaos that ensued as the Passengers fought for space on the dangerously crowded inflatable boatCriminals usually pack more than 60 people onto these boats, but this one had more than 100.
A little girl in a pink jacket, Later identified as Sara, she was briefly visible standing on her father’s shoulders.
Minutes later, a few dozen meters from the shore, she and four other people were dead.
Some Survivors and the bodies of the dead were brought to shore by French rescuers.but the ship, with dozens of people still on board, eventually continued on to England.
This is the second fatal incident this year near Wimereux.
In the days that followed, we found Sara’s family and spoke to her father, Ahmed, about his grief, about the guilt he and his wife felt for putting their three children at such risk, and about the fear of imminent deportation from Europe which prompted his decision to attempt to cross into the UK.
After fleeing Iraq 14 years earlier, Ahmed’s asylum application in Belgium had been repeatedly rejected on the grounds that his hometown, Basra, was now classified as a safe zone.
He had recently been warned that he could be deported from Belgium within days. His children, all born in Europe, grew up living with relatives in Swedenbut they had just received the final order to leave the country.
The bosses
But we also wanted to dig deeper, find the specific criminal gangs responsible for that ship and understand how they fit into a larger lucrative network that continued. funneling tens of thousands of migrants towards a small stretch of the French coast.
On June 18, 15 small boats carried 882 people across the English Channel, a record for a single day this year, which has helped bring the total number of people arriving in the UK so far this year to over 12,000.
Following Sara’s death, British police announced they had arrested two suspected human traffickers who are now awaiting extradition to France.
But these were young men who supposedly worked on the ship itself. Not the powerful bosses in charge.
We set out to find and speak to as many survivors of that April night as possible, meeting some in informal migrant camps or asylum-seeker shelters near the coast of France.
Most of them asked us not to use their names, among other things because Some planned to make new attempts to cross the English Channel.
A young Kuwaiti man, who had been with Sara when she died and had called French police for help, managed to reach the UK a few weeks later. We traced him to Essex.
Many of the dozens of people who boarded the boat with Sara and her family They knew nothing about those in charge of the operation.
They had only spoken to relatively young intermediaries who can often be found outside the train stations in Calais or Boulogne, looking for potential clients.
Once a price had been agreed upon – and there was rarely much haggling – most people moved on to deposit funds electronically with brokers.
We were told that usually They were trusted businessmenwho sometimes operated out of barbershops or grocery stores in places like Türkiye, Paris or London.
The middlemen passed the money to the smuggling gang immediately after the successful crossing.
But three people, including two who had been on the same boat as Sara, told us that the gang of traffickers they had been associated with operated from the Belgian port of Antwerpa city known for its criminal networks and illegal drug trafficking.
They also agreed that The gang was led by a man nicknamed Jabal – “The Mountain” in Arabic.Two of them had met Jabal in person. One had spoken on the phone.
The trail also took us further east, to Berlin, where another source confirmed Jabal’s identity and told us that he had promised him a second attempt to cross, after the first one went wrong.
At this point, all our sources were telling us that “The Mountain” was in Belgium, probably in Antwerp.
The real name of “The Mountain”
We arrived in Antwerp in May and began working on a plan to locate and confront “The Mountain.”
One of his previous clients had shared a photo and another source had provided us with a copy of his Iraqi passport and a European ID that appeared to have been issued in 2021 in a remote location. Italian mountain town where investigations into organized crime are underway.
We discovered that The real name of “The Mountain” was Rebwar Abas Zangana, a Kurdish man from northern Iraq. Single. Apparently a devout Muslim.
He himself had an unclear immigration status. He had recently lived in locations in 3 different countries: Calais, Brussels and Antwerp. They said that was working with two partners and that there could be an even more important figure in Iraq.
Mahmoud, our Arabic-speaking colleague who posed as a migrant seeking to go to the United Kingdom, met an intermediary in a barbershop in Antwerp, who confirmed that he knew “The Mountain” and that he would arrange for us to call to.
We waited almost two weeks for that call, but finally, one night, our phone rang. “Hello. So you want to get to the UK? How many spaces do you need? Are you ready?”.
“The Mountain” spoke in short, concise sentences. In that call, and in two subsequent telephone conversations, he confirmed that he was still in business, assuring us that the trip across the Canal It was “a safe job” and he had perfected his tactics since Sara’s death.
“How many of you are ready?” he asked, adding that the weather in Calais was not good enough to cross the next day.
But hours after that first call, we learned from a source that Abas Zangana had recently left Antwerp in a hurry. It seemed that he feared arrest for his role in the five April deaths.
“The Mountain” was on the run.
A key clue
Then, our source shared a screenshot of “La Montaña”’s phone. It was taken inside a large white tent with rows of black beds, the kind of thing you see in a refugee camp.
When we search the Internet for similar images, we quickly We found a unique and very close matchin a 2022 article about a new official reception center for refugees and migrants in Luxembourg.
We headed there immediately.
Luxembourg is a small country. Its main reception center for refugees and immigrants is located in the modern administrative center of the capital.
Why would “The Mountain” come here? Perhaps he simply hoped to remain unnoticed for a while or apply for asylum under a new name.
But how can we be sure he was here? We couldn’t just walk in. The complex was closed to the general public, with a single entry and exit point guarded by at least four private security guards.
That first night in Luxembourg, posing again as a migrant named Mahmoud, our colleague managed to speak to “The Mountain” on the phone.
In a coordinated move, another BBC colleague drove around the periphery of the complex at the same time, honking his car horn at regular intervals.
Listening to the conversation, we could clearly hear the beeping coming from the smuggler’s phone. “The Mountain” was here.
But how to attract him without arousing suspicion? If he ran away again, we would be back to square one.
The only option: set up surveillance.
We found it
And so, for three days, our team kept watch, monitoring the entrance to the complex and looking out from a vantage point that allowed us to see inside.
Finally, shortly before 3:00 p.m. on the third day, We saw “The Mountain” walking with a group of other migrants. He turned left towards the tram station. We start running.
“It’s not me, brother. I know nothing. What is your problem?” he said, when we caught up with him.
He looked anxious, but kept his voice low and did not confront us as he backed away toward the tram station.
I took a picture of Sara and I asked him if he was to blame for the death of the seven-year-old girl.. He shook his head again.
And then we called his phone number. He could have ignored it. He could have waited quietly until the tram arrived. But when we asked him to answer his phone and show it to us, he seemed momentarily confused and did as we asked.
No doubts about his identity
Moving closer, we looked at the screen and saw the phone number we had been using to call him for days. There was no doubt about his identity.
After speaking with him, we informed the French police, who are leading the investigation into the April deaths. They said they would not comment at this time.
The UK will spend £500m over three years to support French police efforts to secure its coastline and track and dismantle human trafficking networks throughout Europe.
But the French border police told us they were deeply alarmed by the increasing violence from human traffickers.
And while they have claimed some success in arresting the leaders, senior French officials have privately suggested that a long-term solution will depend on the UK changing its own migration and labour policies.
Today, Sara’s surviving family (her father Ahmed, mother Nour, 12-year-old sister Rahaf, and nine-year-old brother Hussam) are staying in a temporary migrant shelter in a small village outside the city of Lille. , in the north of France.
Children have no access to school or the right to remain in France. beyond autumn.
“[Quiero] a normal life, like everyone. I’m missing a lot. I want to go to school in England because I have my cousin there. She is my age. “I miss… my friends,” Rahaf told us, before sobbing.
Ahmed is in contact with French police, who have shown him photographs of several suspected traffickers as part of their own investigation into the deaths. He states that Paying human trafficking gangs was their only option. True or not, he says he has learned a hard lesson.
“These people are greedy. They only care about money. I hope they face justice. All of them,” Ahmed said.
“My daughter’s death should not be in vain.”
Additional reporting by Feras Kawaf and Kathy Long.
Additional production and camera work by Paul Pradier, Marianne Baisnee, Riam El Dilati, Mohanad Hashim, Bruno Boelpaep, Xavier Vanpevenaege, Pol Reygaerts, Maarten Willems and Lea Guedj.
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