Two Kurdish human traffickers confessed their crime

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

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

The NCA said the men were first arrested in April last year and charged in February with “offences of facilitating immigration through Europe”.

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

Both were UK citizens, according to Sky News.

The British crime agency released a video of a man allegedly thanking the smuggler in December 2022, saying the pair “used messaging and social media apps to provide videos from people who had been on the journey so they could advertise their route.” is transported by truck.

According to the NCA, Kurdish criminal groups control increasingly lucrative cross-Channel migration routes. The NCA noted in its 2023 assessment that the groups were mostly located in Northern Europe.

A spokesman for the NCA press office told Rudaw earlier this month that the UK was cooperating with the Kurdistan Region to combat the “crime of organized migration”.

Every year, tens of thousands of people from Iraq and the Kurdistan Region join thousands of others from numerous countries taking dangerous routes to Europe, trying to escape endless crises caused by unemployment, political instability and corruption. The UK is a popular destination for many people, but crossing the English Channel is dangerous and can be fatal.