(Sky News) An illegal immigrant, who came to the UK on a small boat, was helping to smuggle more than 1,000 others into Europe within a month, a court was told.
Ahmed Ramadan Mohamad Ebid, an Egyptian, was said to have played a “vital” role from his west London home in a £12m operation to get migrants from North Africa to southern Italy.
Ebid, who had worked as a fisherman in the Mediterranean, was in regular phone contact with those on the boats as they crossed the sea, said prosecutor Freddy Hookway.
And a secret bug in his home, installed by National Crime Agency (NCA) investigators, caught him talking in code, speaking about fishing, and referring to boats as “cars.”
