The younger children are put to work begging on the streets and as pickpockets, and shuttle back and forth between groups of adults making multiple fraudulent child benefit claims. Teenage girls, some as young as 14, have been forced into prostitution and suffer violent abuse in brothels.

The gang’s activities came to light in May this year with the arrest at Stansted airport of Anna Puzova, a Czech woman, who was trying to enter Britain posing as the guardian of three Romanian children. Inquiries revealed that she had flown alone from Luton airport to Valencia 24 hours earlier.

Puzova, who was pregnant with her ninth child at the time of her arrest, had come to police attention two months earlier after flying into Luton from Barcelona with two children. Further investigations revealed a pattern of frequent travel between British airports and destinations in Spain and Italy.

As a national of a European Union member state, Puzova could travel in and out of Britain free. She always left on her own but returned with children. In police interviews she admitted bringing into Britain 13 Romanian children, aged between 5 and 15, between January and May. The three children who were with her at Stansted are now in the care of social services and are said to be in good health.

Puzova, of Crewe, Cheshire, has told detectives that she does not know the whereabouts of the other ten children, nor the identities of the people to whom she handed them over. She pleaded guilty at Chelmsford Crown Court, Essex, on Thursday to six charges of facilitating the unlawful entry of children into Britain and was jailed for three years.

Police sources told The Times that her case was “the tip of the iceberg” and that extensive inquiries were being conducted into an organised group of people smuggling children into several British airports.

The arrest of Puzova will almost certainly have led the smugglers to change their routes in an attempt to avoid detection.

There are no reliable estimates of the number of children being smuggled and trafficked into Britain but most observers expect that the problem will worsen after the accession of Romania and Bulgaria into the EU next year.

The recently established UK Human Trafficking Centre, based in Sheffield, is involved in several investigations across the country and is running preventive operations in Britain and overseas. Pierre Poupard, Unicef’s representative in Romania, said that poverty was a big driving factor behind the smuggling of children out of the country. The most common routes exploited by the smugglers were through Serbia, then into Spain and onwards to a variety of Western countries.

Hard trade

5 police officers who travelled to Romania last month to advise local officers on people-trafficking

40,000 Romanians expected to come to Britain in the first year after joining the EU

85% of all cashpoint crime in Britain committed by Romanians

? ? there are no reliable estimates of the number of children smuggled into Britain

Source: Metropolitan Police; IPPR; Cabinet Office

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