AN ALBANIAN gangster who masterminded one of the world’s biggest people-trafficking rackets was sent to prison for eight years yesterday.

The court was told that Mhill Sokoli smuggled more than 10,000 illegal immigrants into Britain.

Sokoli was said to have amassed about £12 million over two years by smuggling people into Britain in the backs of cars and lorries.

As Sokoli and his 23-strong gang were jailed by a court in Belgium, the judge said that Britain had become an “easier option” for such traffickers because it lacked an identity card system. “It is surprising that [Britain] does not deal with the causes of the trade in human beings while immense efforts are made here to combat that smuggling,” Judge Freddy Troch said.

Without a co-ordinated approach, the fight against illegal immigration “is like mopping the floor while the tap is running”, the judge said, adding that searching car parks in Belgium for illegal aliens would not solve the problem.

The Belgian news agency, Belga, reported that the judge said: “Great Britain is a country that, because of its deficient legislation, attracts illegal immigrants but which, because of this same deficient legislation, offers them no protection.”

The 24 defendants included 20 Albanians, three Yugoslavs and a Turkish-born Belgian. One man was acquitted for lack of evidence.

They all received heavy sentences after the prosecution at the court in Dendermonde, in northern Belgium, argued successfully that they were guilty of trading in human beings, an offence that carries a maximum jail term of ten years in Belgium, compared with three months for people smuggling.

Sokoli, 35, an Albanian living in Brussels, was fined £77,000 as well as being jailed. Three senior gang members were each jailed for seven years, while those who recruited and transported illegal immigrants were sentenced to six years. Others who provided shelter received three-year terms.

They were said to have brought between 10,000 and 12,000 illegal immigrants, mostly Albanians, into Britain via the Belgian port of Zeebrugge, charging between £280 and £2,100 per person.

Anne-Marie D’Hondt, for the prosecution, told the court that Belgian police had spent months following the racketeers’ trail from Albanian villages to Italy, and from there to Zeebrugge and across the Channel.

The first leg of the journey involved a fast boat across the Adriatic, followed by a train or lorry journey to a safe house near Brussels. Finally, the immigrants would be smuggled through Zeebrugge or, occasionally, Ostend.

Belgian detectives discovered that 15 to 20 people were being smuggled along the route to Britain every day. Each morning the gang’s “book-keeper” made a call to a mobile phone number in Britain to check how many had made it through Dover.

“Every night we watched they tried to bring at least 20 illegals across the Channel hidden on lorries aboard ferries,” Ms D’Hondt said.

“It was brilliantly run, with a sliding scale of tariffs. The top rate was for a guaranteed successful passage on a lorry with a bribed driver. There were lower fees for clients who took their chance by scrambling aboard parked lorries on motorway lay-bys near Zeebrugge while the driver snatched some sleep.

“For some reason, there was a fixed price for black people, with no guarantee of a successful arrival. Britain was for them the promised land where they thought it would be easy to find work.

“This is the biggest case of its kind so far. But we think there are other big fish still active.”

Sokoli was under surveillance for several months before he was arrested at gunpoint as he drove a vanload of ten illegal immigrants to a pick-up point in Belgium last February.

Judge Troch condemned his gang as “ruthless people” who not only provided transport for those “poor souls seeking it”, but also actively recruited illegal immigrants by infiltrating refugee centres to drum up business.

“The illegal immigrants who were transported were poor devils who were exploited back home with dreams of the promised land,” he said.

The case was the second of its kind this year in Belgium. In March a court sentenced seven people to up to ten years in prison for running a human smuggling ring that led to the deaths of eight Turkish illegal immigrants hiding in a cramped cargo container on a boat. Investigators said that the immigrants were probably trying to reach Britain but had been diverted to Waterford in southern Ireland.

In June a Dutch court sentenced seven members of a Chinese gang to up to six years in jail for smuggling illegal immigrants into Britain. Four suspects have been charged in connection with the deaths of 58 Chinese nationals who were found dead in a truck in Dover in 2000.

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