One of the Afghan migrants smuggled into the UK inside a 12-metre metal container last August tried to send a text message to an agent who helped organise the crossing which said: “You’ve killed us all,” a court has heard.
There was no reception in the middle of the Channel so the message, sent as it became obvious there was not enough oxygen to sustain the 35 people making the overnight journey, never reached its intended recipient. When the ship arrived at Tilbury docks the following morning, ferry workers carried out the body of one of the migrants, Meet Singh Kapoor, 40, who had been travelling with his wife and two small children.
Shortly afterwards Waheed Rahimi, 29, received a call from the agent he had tried to text. “I was in a very bad condition, so I started to swear at him. I told him that you killed us,” Rahimi told Basildon crown court, where four men deny organising the trafficking operation.
He and another Afghan migrant, Javed Esmati, 28, described their desperation. “At the beginning it was OK, but there were too many people inside the container. There was some air coming, but later on we started to feel the lack of oxygen,” Esmati told the jury, speaking in Dari through an interpreter.
Esmati said he fled Kabul last May after his father was killed by the Taliban, paying $50,000 (£32,000) to an agent to help him get to safety with his mother and two brothers. He described how he and 34 other Afghan migrants, among them 15 children, moved to the back of the container at the start of the journey, to sit by some small air holes in the metal walls.
“At the beginning it was OK, but later, I felt [I was] not having enough oxygen, not being able to breathe. All of us felt the stress and so we said to each other: ‘Let’s call for help.’” They began to bang on the container walls to try to attract attention.
The children – 12 of whom were under the age of 10 when they were brought out of the container, and the youngest of whom was just 16 months old – were very distressed throughout the journey from Zeebrugge, Belgium, on 15 August. “Most of the children were crying,” Esmati said.
The migrants were hidden in a 1.2-metre-high space, above a consignment of 26 1,000-litre plastic containers containing an unidentified liquid. They had nothing to eat, and although Esmati had a small bottle of water with him, this quickly ran out, he said.
“At the beginning I had a small bottle, but because it was hot and we were sweating, the water was finished, so I had no choice but to drink from the water containers which were there in the lorry. At the beginning, I was very thirsty, I had a few gulps, it had no smell, that’s why I drank it,” Esmati told the jury.
Rahimi described how he too had been forced to leave Kabul, after threats were made to his family. He told the court that his father had been taken from his grocery shop by government officials and had never been seen again. He paid $25,000 to a local agent who promised to get him to the UK.
He said the container journey was “horrific” and described how those inside began to suffer soon after they left Zeebrugge. “The problem was that inside the container there was no oxygen,” he told the court, through an interpreter. “It was a very bad situation after a couple of hours, I don’t know exactly how long. Gradually everybody got into problems. I told them: ‘Let’s bang on the container so they will hear us.’”
The agents had given clear instructions to the migrants that they should turn off their mobile phones and be quiet, but inside the container, some turned them on from time to time to use as a light or to check the time.
Rahimi told the court he turned his on at one point and received a call from the agent. “He cursed me. He said: ‘I told you to turn off your mobile, so turn it off,’” Rahimi said.
When P&O staff at Tilbury docks in Essex heard banging and shouting from inside the container, they called the police, who opened it with metal-cutters and freed the migrants. Ferry staff said during an earlier day of evidence that some of the children were unconscious when they were removed from the container.
Stephen McLaughlin, 34, and Timothy Murphy, 33, both from Derry in Northern Ireland, Martin McGlinchey, 47, from County Tyrone, and Taha Sharif, 38, from Tottenham, north London, have all pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to facilitate illegal entry into the UK.
The case has shed light on the difficult journeys made by migrants. The court heard how Esmati and Rahimi made their separate journeys from Afghanistan to the UK, travelling first to Iran, then to Turkey, Greece, Italy, France and Belgium.
Esmati told how he found some aspects of the journey, such as the boat journey to Greece, very alarming. “I was scared because I did not know how to swim, but I had to travel,” he said. “We were told that you should paddle straight and they said someone will be waiting for you on the other side.”
Both Rahimi and Esmati said they made several attempts to board lorries at Calais and Dunkirk, but were removed before the lorries set off. When they were unsuccessful they were told by an agent to make their way to Lokeren in Belgium, where they were put into a white van with 33 Afghan Sikhs, and about 20 minutes later offloaded into the container, they said.
The trial continues.
