A complex migrant smuggling scheme between Britain and Europe has been cracked by law enforcement officials who are celebrating the conviction of a smuggler who had used dozens of aliases while on the run for 28 years.
Charles Lynch was jailed for three years and eight months after border force found eight Albanians including two women and a child in his Saquerlotte III after a high-speed pursuit off the English coast last November.
Authorities were alerted by how fast Lynch was driving an apparently innocuous 14-metre leisure craft and gave chase in two boats and a helicopter in the middle of the night.
"It became apparent early on that the vessel didn't want to stop," said Andy Vidamour from the UK border force.
"We initially wanted to identify the vessel, ask some questions, before we made any further decisions on whether it would be boarded or not."
"Once it became apparent the vessel wasn't intending to stop, we entered into a high speed pursuit, which ultimately resulted in us pulling in front of the vessel at about 36 knots.
Lynch initially claimed he was a German man called Wolfram Steidl, but it later emerged he was a criminal who fled a jail in Maidstone, Kent in 1992. He was only a year into a seven-year sentence for theft, fraud and forgery, and had previously been convicted of possessing indecent images of children in France.
The National Crime Agency believes Lynch speaks multiple languages and has at least 40 aliases. There are suggestions he may smuggled migrants across the Channel on multiple occasions.
"There is a clear message here: If people are intent on trafficking people across from Europe to the UK, they run a high risk of being caught and being sentenced to a term of imprisonment,” said Shane Williams of the National Crime Agency.
"We have got a degree of sympathy for people who are trafficked because of the circumstances they are leaving in their home countries, but I would say it's a significant risk for them to try to cross the Channel and I would warn them not to do it,” he added.
Some 1,900 migrants were stopped trying to cross into the UK via the Channel in 2019, often on rubber dinghies. Roughly 300 people have attempted the journey in 2020.
