An Egyptian people smuggler made more than £12 million ($15.5 million) from sending thousands of migrants across the Mediterranean in an operation he ran from his London home, a court has been told.
Ahmed Ebid, 41, arrived in the UK on a small boat in October 2022 but three weeks later he was organising the movement of migrants from Libya to Italy in craft with hundreds crammed on board.
The former fisherman was linked to the smuggling operation after he made phone calls to satellite phones on board the migrant boats. Those numbers were then used to call the Italian Coastguard telling it the location of the migrant ships, so they could be towed to safety and those on board taken ashore.
The UK’s National Crime Agency bugged his home in west London and recorded calls he made organising smuggling, in which he referred to boats in code as “cars”, and he was eventually arrested and charged in June 2023.
Ebid has pleaded guilty to assisting unlawful immigration but at a special hearing in a London court is disputing aspects of the case against him.
Prosecutor Frederick Hookway said Italian authorities interviewed the migrants and asked them how much they paid, and passed that information to the NCA as part of its investigation into Ebid. The average paid by the 3,781 migrants whose passage he organised was £3,272, meaning he made £12,375,212, the NCA calculated.
“This gives an indication, the prosecution submits, of the scale of the profits to be made from this enterprise,” said Mr Hookway.
The prosecution alleges that Ebid was involved in the sourcing and provision of boats and crews for crossings from Libya to Europe. It says he also gave technical advice to the crews during the crossings, was involved in the movement of migrants before the crossings, organised their housing and dealt with any paperwork.
Ebid maintains that he made only €15,000 ($16,400) from the operation and that his involvement was limited to providing navigational and seafaring advice. He said his primary motivation was to get his family to the UK.
Seven crossings, from October 2022 to April 2023, have been directly linked to Ebid and he called one boat 34 times. The number of migrants on board the vessels ranged between 200 and 700.
In the bugged conversations, Ebid was heard to say of people smuggling that “it’s a living which came to my doorsteps, would I say no to it?” and that it was “30,000 times” better than fishing. In another call he said that anyone carrying a phone on board a boat “will be killed”.
During a search of his home, two Italian mobile phones were seized along with other devices. Two notebooks were also seized, one of which contained maritime co-ordinates for the area between Libya and Italy.
Ebid has a previous conviction for attempting to smuggle a tonne of cannabis into Italy, for which he was given a six-year jail sentence.
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