As documented in the podcast, Jaf promoted his services on social media, offering a people-smuggling service that covered the distance stretching from Afghanistan to the UK.<\/p>\n
His adverts featured glamorous images of London and testimonies from apparently satisfied customers.<\/p>\n
He also provided a choice of routes and modes of transport, depending on how much migrants can afford.<\/p>\n
Speaking to a BBC translator who pretended to be an interested would-be customer, Jaf quoted a price of \u00a3160,000 to bring a whole family to the UK on a “VIP” flight service to Manchester.<\/p>\n
However, the BBC also heard stories from some of Jaf’s less-well-off passengers who described being shunted onto dangerously overpacked boats late at night and left to steer themselves across the English Channel.<\/p>\n
The UK’s National Crime Agency announced on Tuesday that a suspected people smuggler had been arrested on 13 May, without naming Jaf.<\/p>\n
Its Director General of Operations Rob Jones said the case was a “potentially very significant arrest of an individual who has been under active investigation by numerous law enforcement agencies because of his links to people smuggling”.<\/p>\n
Jones said “there should not be an assumption that individuals like those featured in (the BBC’s) documentary are out of our reach”.<\/p>\n
He added the NCA currently has more than 100 investigations ongoing into networks or individuals in the top tier of organised immigration crime, including those based in locations across the Middle East and Africa “where they might previously have thought they could operate with impunity”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As documented in the podcast, Jaf promoted his services on social media, offering a people-smuggling service that covered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":593684,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-593683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=593683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593683\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/593684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=593683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=593683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}