Stowaway numbers increase
Page 13
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
by Miles Brignall and David Craik • The incidence of illegal immigrants stowing away is out of control.
Last week Italian police found 85 Romanians, including dozens of children, hidden in an Austrian registered truck enroute from Prague to Northern Italy. On the same day Essex haulier Brian Chelsea rang CM
to criticise Customs officials at Dover for failing to find six illegal immigrants from Sri Lanka hidden in one of his trailers.
Brian Chelsea, transport manager at JS Willson of Thurrock, says officials usually check his trailers to see if they are properly sealed after driving off a ferry. However, when one of his trucks disembarked last Wednesday morning after pick
ing up a load of plastic pallets from Lubben in Southern Germany, his trailer was waved straight through without being checked.
"It was not until the truck was in our yard later that evening and the son of one of our drivers told us he had heard voices coming from it that we knew anything was up," he says. The trailer was opened and inside were found four adults and two children of Asian appearance. The police later confirmed them to be Sri Lankan, says Chelsea.
"We want to warn hauliers in that area that this could happen to them. Luckily for us there was no damage done to the trailer," Chelsea says.
Each week CM has noticed a rise in the number of calls from hauliers claiming they have been the innocent victims of immigrants stowing away on vehicles to cross the Channel. Large numbers are arriving from Italy because of its proximity to war-torn areas of Eastern Europe. Although some travel solo, taking a chance, most immigrants are "helped" into trucks by gangs who charge large sums of money and target truckstops. Some of the groups involved are thought to have switched from drugs to people smuggling, as it is just as lucrative and doesn't attract the long prison sentences given to convicted drug smugglers.