I have covered enough of these cases to recognise the pattern. A gang spots weak spots in our border security, packs desperate people into refrigerated lorries, and counts the cash. On 10 July this year at Birmingham Crown Court, two more members of one such network finally faced justice.
Duc Quang Ta, 36, received eight years in prison for conspiring to facilitate unlawful immigration and possessing criminal property. Sarfaraz Sardarzehi, 58, was handed a two-year sentence suspended for 21 months for the same conspiracy. Between 18 August and 6 September 2020, Ta helped smuggle 22 Vietnamese nationals into the UK and attempted another 16 runs. Sardarzehi assisted three of those migrants once they arrived and moved cash for the group.
The methods were as callous as they were calculated. Migrants were hidden in the backs of lorries that crossed via ferries or the Channel Tunnel, then transferred to cars. The pair used encrypted phone apps and coded language that stripped victims of their humanity. Migrants became "siblings", "chicken", "pork" or simply "things". Refrigerated lorries were "fridges", ferries "going by water", money "paper", police "dogs" and vehicles "horses". This was not transport. It was cargo.
The Vietnamese migrants they smuggled into the UK endured long journeys, some of them in the back of refrigerated lorries, which could have had dangerous consequences.
Those are the words of Thomas Short, CPS specialist prosecutor for the serious and organised crime division. They capture the indifference these men showed to human life. Ta was arrested on the M25 near Leatherhead in September 2020 with £56,020 in cash, believed to be payment for lorry drivers, and a phone loaded with incriminating evidence. Sardarzehi was stopped in Birmingham the same month driving a Vauxhall Corsa carrying three migrants linked to the operation.
Three other gang members, Mai Van Nguyen, 36, Hai Xuan Le or Ho Sy Quoc, 28, and Habib Behsodi, 45, had already been convicted of the same offence in 2022 and 2023. The National Crime Agency led the investigation. The Crown Prosecution Service brought the case. After a 16-day trial in February this year the jury took just one hour to return guilty verdicts.
Sara-Jayne Moore, NCA branch commander, put it bluntly. "Ta and Sardarzehi have paid the price for being part of an evil organised immigration crime group that exploited migrants, all for the sake of making money. They put them in great danger by hiding them in HGVs, and the way they were described shows the utter contempt they had for human life."
