Ozcan and his gang had met to discuss the operation in the bar of the New York Hotel, Rotterdam, on Monday 12 June, six days before the transport. Unknown to Ozcan, his car had been bugged by Dutch police and his every move was monitored. But although they had witnessed Ozcan leaving for the meeting, the police decided that the gang leader had no imminent operations planned and lifted the surveillance.
At the meeting Ozcan expressed concerns about a backlog of migrants building up in Rotterdam. As he was responsible for the cost of feeding and housing them it made sound economic sense for him to get rid of them as soon as possible. For this reason he decided to send all sixty in a single shipment. He was only too aware of the risks. On 5 April one of his drivers, Leo Nijveen, had driven a lorry with fifty Chinese on board, hidden by a pallet of yoghurt, on to the three thirty a.m. Zeebrugge–Dover ferry. Half-way through the journey the human cargo ran out of air and started screaming and banging on the sides of the lorry.
Nijveen threw open the doors and let them out. He was fined £2000 per head for having illegal immigrants on board but allowed to return to Holland. The fine was later dropped when police said there was insufficient evidence to show that he knew the Chinese were on his lorry.
Despite the 5 April incident, Ozcan was determined to clear the backlog. A number of petty crooks were hired to do the dirty work, thus shielding him from any investigation. Hubertus van Keulen was paid £1200 to rent a warehouse at Waalhaven, part of Rotterdam’s harbour, while Willem Jansen was paid £2000 to buy the tomatoes, the dummy cargo, which Nijveen later collected. Nijveen also bought the tractor unit of the truck from a garage near his home, and later purchased the trailer.
Knowing that he could no longer risk the journey himself, Nijveen also recruited Perry Wacker, a lorry driver from the city’s eastern suburbs. Nijveen and Wacker had previously worked together and Nijveen was well aware that his friend was desperate for cash. The previous year while travelling through Spain, Wacker had fallen in love with a Moroccan girl called Nora. He had quickly proposed and they were due to be married on 17 July. But because Nora was not an EU national the marriage would not go ahead unless Wacker could satisfy the Dutch authorities that he had enough money to support them both. For driving the gang’s lorry across the Channel Wacker had been promised a fee of £300 per person – a grand total of £18,000 for just a few hours’ work. His money problems, it seemed, were all behind him.
With a driver engaged, the final stage in the preparations was to set up a cover company to protect Ozcan and the Snakeheads in the event that the consignment was discovered by Customs. For this they needed a
katvanger,
a front man paid to provide a cover identity for criminal operations. They chose Arien van der Speck, a petty criminal from the eastern suburb of Terbregge. Days before the transport, van der Speck visited the Rotterdam chamber of commerce and founded a haulage firm, Van Der Speck Transport. Ozcan’s carefully constructed plan was ready to execute.
At around two-thirty in the afternoon of 18 June the fifty-six men and four women who made up Ozcan’s shipment were brought to the warehouse at Waalhaven. They had arrived in two separate vans, one disguised to look as though it contained building materials, the other dressed up to look like an ambulance. Inside the warehouse was a 1995 Mercedes truck hooked up to an eighteen-metre container. Aided by half a dozen members of the smuggling gang, along with a chain-smoking Perry Wacker, the group was slowly loaded on to the lorry.
The third weekend of June was the hottest of 2000, and in three layers of clothing Ke Shi Guang was already sweaty and uncomfortable when his turn came to climb aboard. ‘I walked towards the back and squatted on the floor alongside the others. It was dark but there was a small window up on the left almost near the ceiling and I remember that I could see light coming through it.’
Four buckets of water were passed up, along with a handful of plastic bags for excrement. ‘They pushed one box of tomatoes towards the back and said we could eat those but that if we ate any more we would be fined,’ remembers Guang. ‘Then a man in a black T-shirt pointed to the small window and said that if it was open we can speak in low voice. He said if it closed, we not speak at all’
Then Wacker and the rest of the gang stacked the remaining boxes of tomatoes around the group, hiding them from view and taking up so much space that they were forced to huddle together. The heavy swing doors were slammed shut.
It was shortly before three p.m. when Wacker climbed into the cab and set out for Zeebrugge with his human freight. Just outside the ferry terminal he stopped off for diesel. This was the riskiest part of the journey and the need for total secrecy was at its highest. Having ensured that no one was watching too closely, Wacker climbed up the front wheel arch and reached for the vent. Inside the container, Ke Su De saw a hand reach up, then blackness.
Wacker drove through the gates of the terminal at six p.m. and had to wait around an hour before he was waved forward to board the European Pathway, a P&O freight-only ferry that would be leaving for Dover half an hour later. Once he had parked, Wacker went up into the ship’s canteen and dined on shrimp salad, roast lamb and rice, then made his way to the cinema room to while away the five-hour crossing by watching the adventure film
The Mummy.
By the time the end credits rolled, the sixty Chinese had been inside the container for more than four hours. The single tray of tomatoes had lasted barely an hour but the group had far more pressing concerns than food. The temperature had soared and many felt as though they were being roasted alive. They ripped off their outer layer of clothes and gulped down the water until that, too, was gone.
The air around them became so saturated with moisture that they were no longer able to sweat. Their body temperature rose and some of the weaker members of the group collapsed with exhaustion.
And then the air started to run out.
The vent that Wacker had closed had been the only source of fresh oxygen for the whole container. With sixty, hot sweaty bodies gasping away, the air soon turned dank and fetid as the oxygen levels plummed.
‘People began to panic,’ recalls Ke Su De. ‘Some people passed out in the darkness. I wanted to breathe air so I got close to the tomatoes but I do not think they were any use. Then people started screaming and shouting for help. We tried to move the tomatoes and kick open the doors but it was no use. I did what I could to try to make one fellow passenger comfortable. People were having greater and greater difficulty in breathing. We all banged on the side, hit the walls with our shoes. We shouted and called for help. No help came.’
High above them in the video room, Perry Wacker glanced at his watch. There were still two hours to go before the ship reached Dover. He settled back in his seat and began watching
Austin Powers.
Back in the container the group were dying one by one. Eventually they resigned themselves to their fate. They held hands and ate tomatoes partly for moisture but also because the Chinese believe no one should die on an empty stomach and ‘become a hungry ghost’.
Ke Su De held on for as long as he could, thinking of his family back home and how much he longed to see them again. With the last of his strength he tried to pry open the air vent, ripping off a wooden panel on the inside of the truck. But it was no use. As his fellow passengers lay dying around him, he felt powerless to help. Then he, too, succumbed and fell unconscious.
Across the water a British member of the Snakehead gang was preparing for the group’s arrival. Before getting on to the truck at Rotterdam each migrant had been told to either memorise or write down a mobile-telephone number and call it as soon as they arrived in the UK.
It belonged to a Chinese interpreter called Ying Guo, known to her friends as Jenny. A key member of the gang, her task was to organise asylum application and to arrange for any final fees to be paid. Originally from north-eastern China, Guo had worked in a car factory but arrived in England in the summer of 1996 to pursue her own dream of a better life. Having been granted a student visa, she enrolled on a course at Edgware College in north London studying English, accounting and computing.
But before her studies were complete, a chance encounter with a friend led to her finding work as an interpreter at the Home Office immigration centre in Croydon, south London. What began on an
ad-hoc
basis soon turned into a full-time job with Guo spending up to forty hours each week interpreting for asylum applicants at Home Office screenings and interviews with solicitors.
Exactly how she came to work for the Snakehead gangs is not known, but it is clear that once she did she was soon on her way to becoming a wealthy woman. She bought herself a plush flat in South Woodford, Essex, and had so much cash to spare that she even managed to send back £37,000 to her family in China in three months. By agreeing to be the first point of contact for immigrants smuggled in by the gang, Guo would be in a position to refer these new ‘clients’ to solicitors. Because of her language abilities, the solicitors gave Guo the work of translating the applications.
In the eighteen months before the Dover tragedy, Guo dealt with more than 366 asylum applicants, nearly one in ten of all the Chinese applicants dealt with by the Home Office during that period. Although the work involved a great deal of duplication and took up little of her time, she would earn on average £125 per case plus an additional £100 per person from the Snakeheads. With the arrival of this latest group of immigrants Guo was anticipating a bumper £13,500 payday.
The red flag had been raised over Wacker’s lorry long before it arrived in Dover. For one thing Wacker had paid the £412 fare in cash. As the vast bulk of commercial freight traffic is paid on account, Customs agents automatically forward the details of any vehicle paying in cash to the destination port. He had also brought attention to himself because no one at Dover had heard of Van Der Speck Transporten – hardly surprising as it had been registered just three days before.
As the lorry rolled into view David Bell, the Customs officer, picked up the manifest and noted that the lorry was carrying a cargo of tomatoes bound for Bristol. ‘I didn’t believe it. I just knew it had to be smuggling. My immediate thought was that it was booze or fags, probably both.’
At first Wacker seemed relaxed, smoking a cigarette, chatting and joking with the Customs officers. But when they asked him more about the company he was supposedly working for, he became nervous and evasive, promising to send more details later. But by then it was too late. David Bell was already making his way to the rear of the container and opening the heavy swing doors.
At around eight a.m. on the morning of Monday 19 June, seven hours after the bodies had been discovered but before the news had been made public, Ying Guo telephoned solicitor Chandika Wal-pita, who knew nothing about her illegal activities, and asked if he could deal with some asylum matters on behalf of a large number of Chinese people.
‘She told me that she had been instructed to ask about some Chinese asylum-seekers who had arrived in the country. She said that there were sixty of them and asked whether I wanted to represent them. It was a lot of people. I said I wouldn’t be able to take the whole lot but I said I might be able to take half.’
Fourteen minutes later Guo called back to say she was unsure what was happening with the immigrants. Although she did not let on, Guo was starting to worry and Walpita picked up on the anxiety in her voice. She knew that Wacker’s lorry should have disembarked hours earlier but none of the immigrants had called her and Wacker’s mobile phone had been switched off.
Walpita did not hear from her again until just after midnight on 20 June. ‘She was hysterical. She said that they had found her mobile-phone number on one of the persons who had been found dead in the container,’ he explains. ‘She asked me what to do and I said I had no idea about criminal matters but that I could ask somebody who did. She said she had thrown her phone away, that she had destroyed it.’
In fact, Guo’s number had been found on twenty-seven of the bodies, either on scraps of paper or stitched into their clothing, and on a further sixteen items discarded on the floor of the lorry. As well as destroying her mobile phone she had also deleted a number of incriminating files on her computer including records of the bank account where she kept the vast sums of money she had made by working for the Snakehead gangs.
But although hers was a crucial role in the operation, Guo knew she was all too expendable and that the rest of the gang would do nothing to protect her. The following day, she turned herself in to the police.
A few weeks after the Dover tragedy I travelled down to the Kent port to meet with Lin, an illegal Chinese immigrant who worked in a nearby town, having been brought into Britain illegally by a Snakehead gang a few months earlier.
Speaking with the aid of an interpreter, as we sit in the corner of a quiet Chinese restaurant on Dover’s high street, Lin tells me his journey was fraught with difficulty. His family had paid a small deposit and promised to pay more when he arrived in Europe so that he could complete his journey. But the person who had promised to loan the rest was unable to help so Lin found himself stuck in Rotterdam for nearly four weeks. It was a desperate situation. ‘If the money was not paid then I’m in the hands of the Snakeheads. I would be the one in real danger. They told me I could earn some money if I worked for them, helping with the other immigrants. I had no choice, I had to do it.’
Lin helped maintain the safe-houses in which the immigrants were made to wait before being loaded on the lorries for the journey across the Channel. ‘Conditions were very bad. One small house with more than fifty people. Everywhere was dirty and everywhere was like a bedroom – blankets, mattresses, pillows – even in the kitchen. The people were not allowed to leave in case they were seen – they had given me a false Dutch passport so I could pick up their supplies but the rest of them had to remain inside all the time.