On a stormy February evening three years ago, Ricky Crellin, a British lorry driver, heard loud banging coming from the inside of another HGV trailer as the cross-Channel ferry he was on docked at Calais.
When Crellin and other concerned hauliers prised open the back doors of the Spanish-registered vehicle they discovered dozens of disorientated and freezing migrants desperate to get out.
“There was a 50-50 split of men and women,” Crellin, 60, recalled. “I knew this was something different because they were all well spoken and dressed in nice clothes. They were like middle-class people.”
Unlike the thousands of migrants who risk their lives crossing the Channel in small boats to enter Britain, the 58 north Africans in the trailer were travelling in the opposite direction and seeking to get into France undetected. They were part of a trend in “reverse” people smuggling in which UK-based gangsters charge migrants, including young children, up to £1,500 each for clandestine passage to the Continent.
The trade has been fuelled by a French clampdown on the issuing of visas to visitors from several former colonies, including Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
Many migrants from these countries are instead flying legitimately to the UK on tourist visas before being smuggled to France, often by north African gangs in London willing to provide false identity documents.
It can now be revealed that one linchpin of the lucrative racket, Madjid Belabes, 53, acquired British citizenship after arriving in the UK from Algeria more than 20 years ago. Until his recent conviction for people smuggling, Belabes was living in a council-owned apartment on the top floor of a multimillion-pound townhouse in Camberwell, south London.
He masterminded a sophisticated operation that often involved him picking up migrants from a hostel in the capital that previously served as the headquarters of the Labour Party.
Madjid Belabes and the hostel in Elephant and Castle
CPS; SUNDAY TIMES
Belabes used a network of corrupt taxi drivers to transport his clients to locations near Dover, where they would be transferred into the back of a lorry bound for Calais.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) estimates that his gang was responsible for attempting to smuggle more than 240 migrants to France in ten months, including many of the distressed men and women discovered by Crellin in February 2023.
“We know the gangs and drivers involved in smuggling migrants out of the UK are often involved in smuggling into the UK too,” said John Turner, a senior investigating officer at the NCA. “Like Madjid Belabes, their only concern is making money. Belabes didn’t care about the potentially fatal dangers facing migrants hidden in lorry trailers.
“Tackling organised immigration crime is a key priority for the NCA, and alongside our international law enforcement partners, we are relentless in our efforts to dismantle these networks wherever they operate.”
Closing doors
The use of Britain as a back door into France by north Africans has increased since September 2021, when President Macron’s government announced it was slashing by half the number of French visas available to people in Morocco and Algeria, and reducing by a third the number of visas available to those from Tunisia.
The development, which followed pressure from right-wing politicians to get tough on immigration, was a response to the north African countries refusing to take back their own citizens expelled from France.
Home Office data indicates that there was a knock-on effect on applications for tourist visas to Britain from Algeria: they more than doubled between 2019 and 2023, from 21,005 to 50,262. Visa applications from Morocco over the same period leapt from 23,892 to 34,783. However, many of the applications from both countries were rejected.
Criminals such as Belabes, who was unemployed and married with four children, sniffed an opportunity as France began to close its doors.
Four-figure fees
Prosecutors at Kingston upon Thames crown court, where Belabes was convicted and jailed at the end of November, claimed he oversaw at least 26 “runs” in which north African migrants arriving in Britain were smuggled to France between December 2022 and September 2023.
On many occasions he would personally pick up his clients from the 500-bed Safetstay hostel on Walworth Road in Elephant and Castle, south London.
The building was previously known as John Smith House, named after the former Labour leader, and served as the party’s HQ until it moved to Millbank Tower in 1997. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by Safestay.
CCTV footage gathered by NCA investigators from the night of February 20, 2023, and from several other dates, revealed that Belabes would walk his customers about 100m down the road to a McDonald’s restaurant on the junction of Manor Place.
They would wait there until a fleet of Algerian-born taxi drivers would arrive one by one to transport them to the Kent coast.
Video showed cash changing hands in the vehicles despite the fact that they were parked on the same street as Walworth police station.
The migrants were each charged £1,200 on average to be smuggled to France. The cut for the taxi drivers was relatively modest: they received up to £40 for each passenger they took to Dover.
Once they were close to the port, the migrants would be transferred into the back of a complicit lorry, often in a lay-by or service station.
How racket was thwarted
Crellin, who has driven long-distance vans and lorries for more than 15 years, was on the Calais-bound ferry that sailed on February 21, 2023.
Although Belabes had arranged passage for many of the 58 north Africans discovered in the trailer, some appeared to have been placed by other criminal gangs.
“I met a family of four Moroccans who told me they had started their journey in Manchester before being taken down to London,” said Crellin. “It was quite a rough crossing that day, so I think many of the migrants had started to panic in the lorry.
“They didn’t have a clue where they were when they got out. Some thought they were still in Britain.”
French authorities arrested two men who had been driving the suspicious lorry.
Crellin, who livestreamed some of the incident on TikTok, where he is known as RickyVanMan, had been due to give evidence at Belabes’s trial.
The smuggler was arrested after a dawn raid at his home by the NCA in November 2024. Officers found £11,045 in cash during the search.
Madjid Belabes is arrested at his south London home
Belabes was later linked to an organised crime group led by Azize Benaniba, 41, another Algerian gangster living in London.
Benaniba and six associates were convicted of people smuggling offences last July after a trial at Isleworth crown court, southwest London. They had tried to argue as part of their defence that they were “simply doing the government’s job for them” by taking migrants out of Britain to France.
Investigators intercepted 157 migrants smuggled by Benaniba’s gang between February and October 2023. The scam also involved facilitating migrants’ travel to the UK from north Africa on legitimate tourist visas.
Some gang members were separately found to be in possession of fake French passports and ID cards when their homes were raided. The documents would have helped paying clients to melt into the black economy once they had arrived in France.
Belabes pleaded guilty to conspiracy to assist unlawful immigration to France on the third day of a trial that had been expected to last three weeks in November. He was separately found guilty of possessing more than £11,000 in cash from his crimes.
Belabes was jailed for a total of ten years and nine months. Five taxi drivers who worked for him have also been convicted and face sentencing at Kingston crown court on January 23.
The migrants caught by the NCA were sent back to Britain, but were not prosecuted because they were not in breach of any UK laws. Some are believed to have stayed here for many months before being successfully smuggled over to France in a later attempt.
The Home Office said: “People smuggling is an abhorrent crime that puts lives at risk. We will continue to ensure evil smugglers, such as Madjid Belabes, face the full force of the law.”
Additional reporting by Matilda Davies and Emily Sturgeon