ANYONE OVER 30 should stop reading here. As the year draws to a close and critics rush to catalogue the events, people and anthems of the year, a poll of Radio 1’s listeners to find the all-time top 100 has chosen few of the old classics. Smuggling people has proved to be a profitable extra income for the gangs, but unlike drug trafficking does not carry the risk of a heavy jail sentence.”People have become just another commodity to make money from,” said an NCIS detective.. Albanians, often pretending to be from the Serbian province of Kosovo, are the biggest group coming into the UK. They pay about pounds 200 each to be smuggled in the back of a lorry to Germany and then on to the Netherlands.

A further pounds 50 gets them a ride in the back of a lorry to the UK.Once in Britain most migrants head for London where some of the deals include advice on how to claim benefit and how to apply for asylum.Many of the criminals are using established drug routes to bring in their human cargo. They provide false documents to get them into Prague or Moscow, then follow the same route as the Chinese.A growth area for both gangs has been in the trafficking of eastern Europeans, most noticeably Romanians, Slovaks and Czechs. Occasionally a small boat brings them across.Dover is the most popular port of arrival, but Hull, Felixstowe, Harwich and south coast ports are also used.Fixers from the Sub- continent usually charge their Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan clients about pounds 2,000 a person. Once inside the EU, movement is easy with few border controls.

They are taken to France, Belgium or the Netherlands and kept in a safe house before crossing to Britain via ferry or the Channel tunnel with fake papers, or hidden in the back of a lorry. They sometimes pay in instalments with families in China being charged exorbitant interest on outstanding balances. One of the largest smuggling groups is known to bring in 250 people a month, and a typical route involves a flight to Hong Kong or Singapore, with an onward connection to Moscow, Prague or Budapest.Smugglers who arrange the European end of the transport sometimes organise their convoys along military lines, with a forward reconnaissance vehicle, a rear guard, and drivers who use night-vision goggles and walkie-talkies to take their human cargo across the frontier. People going “first class” use counterfeit or forged original documents. The method can also involve people impersonating the legitimate owners of the documents. The “second- class” route involves hiding in the back of a lorry or small boat.The Chinese pay the most to be smuggled into Britain. NCIS says that while some of the people being brought in by the crime gangs are among the estimated 38,000 people who applied for asylum this year, most are economic migrants looking for a better life.There are two basic smuggling systems.

For this price they can get fake identification, a flight, the help of a bent solicitor and a job in a kitchen.According to the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), people- smuggling is a growing problem that is attracting an increasing number of highly organised gangs. People-smuggling has become big business for an estimated 20 international organised crime gangs that are bringing between 2,000 and 4,000 illegal immigrants into Britain every month.
The Romanians probably paid about pounds 250 a head to be taken to a safe house in Belgium before being driven to England in a lorry trailer, but some of the Chinese immigrants who arrive illegally in Chinatown, central London, pay up to pounds 15,000 for a “first-class ticket”. WHEN POLICE found 103 Romanians crammed into the back of a lorry in Kent this month, the discovery focused attention on the cheap end of a multi-million pound industry. General Kovacs continued: “If the west wants Hungary to be an EU border country, it should give us more help. We have no computers at all on our eastern border.”Istvan Dobo, of the Budapest Office for Refugees and Migration, said: “When Hungary joins the EU it will have borders with non-member states, somore people will head for Hungary and, because of Schengen, once they are here they will be able to travel freely in the EU.. With Poland and the Czech Republic, also popular transit destinations because they border Germany, Hungary is likely to join the EU early in the next century.

The Hungarian border guards, equipped with obsolete computers and dilapidated vehicles, are being swamped by this human tidal waveGeneral Dezso Kovacs of the Gyor border guards said: “These are hi-tech networks, stretching from the departure country to the organisers in Budapest and the contacts on the green border.”The migrants are either provided with forged documents or smuggled through.”Hungary is now coming under diplomatic pressure to tighten its borders. Hungary’s proximity to the West, and the lack of visa requirements for citizens of countries such as Turkey, Yugoslavia and much of the former Soviet Union, has made Budapest the smugglers’ favourite city.Once an illegal immigrant has made it across into Austria, and the Schengen zone, he or she can link up with fellow-countrymen who will then pass them along a human chain until they reach their destination. But not many tourists try to cross Hungary’s “green” border with Austria at 2am without any papers.Rashid is one of thousands who are taking their chances on Europe’s people-smuggling network, which stretches through Turkey and the former Soviet Union to the favourite destinations – Germany, Austria and, increasingly, Britain.Between 600 and 800 Kosovo Albanians alone are caught every month on the Austro-Hungarian border.People-smuggling networks, often linked to organised crime, use the Hungarian capital as their collection and distribution point, say officials. Nobody knows exactly where he was planning to go, but the border guards at Gyor, 70 miles from Budapest and about the same distance from Vienna, were sure he was trying to cross illegally.
“I don’t know why I am being held here, I am a tourist and I wanted to go to Vienna to see my aunt,” he told them. RASHID, A PAKISTANI student in his twenties, was stopped on the Hungarian border as he tried to cross into Austria. His coach described him as one of the outstanding yachtsmen of his generation.Two other yachtsmen have died in the storm and another three are missing, feared drowned.. But he turned the tables on Mr Smith in the two-man Star Class for the 1996 Games.Mr Carr said that Mr Charles was intense, sensitive, enthusiastic, but above all honest, with a highly developed sense of fair play.