A taxi driver who helped to smuggle migrants in the UK has been ordered to pay back £100,000.
Habib Behsodi, of Rochester Street, Chatham, was found guilty of conspiring to facilitate illegal immigration in December 2022.
The 44-year-old ferried migrants who had been smuggled into the UK in the backs of lorries up to the West Midlands, where the Vietnamese organised crime group he was working with was based.
Birmingham Crown Court heard tBehsodi was part of a network bringing people into the country in the backs of lorries in the Europe-wide enterprise – with the human cargo referred to as “pork” and “chicken” in intercepted phone messages.
Those being transported are thought to have paid up to £17,000 for passage by entering into a debt agreement – working off some or all of their fee by labouring in places like cannabis farms, on arrival.
He was also involved in taking payments from those who had been transported in.
Behsodi, a married father of a three-year-old daughter, was originally from Afghanistan but had come to the UK after persecution by the Taliban regime, the judge heard.
Barrister Danielle Barden, in mitigation, said at the time he had fled torture, including “having boiling water poured over him by Taliban officers”.
Judge Dean Kershaw responded to that mitigation, saying: “He came here essentially as an asylum seeker.
“Then involved himself in this, knowing what he went through and then didn’t care as to what others might be going through.”
He told Behsodi: “Your role was like a courier, but you were a courier of individuals who were vulnerable, and brought in for profit.
“These people were treated as commodities – but they were people, human beings.”
Behsodi, he said, “played a significant role”, and was “not just on the periphery”, or an individual who – as the cab driver himself had claimed – had made “an honest mistake”.
Behsodi was given a 20-month jail term, suspended for two years.
Following his conviction, National Crime Agency (NCA) financial investigators began work to identify assets that could be proceeds of crime.
At a hearing on Friday (June 27), he was ordered to pay £100,000 or face an additional 12-month jail term. He has three months to hand over the money.
NCA senior investigating officer Paul Boniface said: “Behsodi made this money from his criminality, so it is only right that he should not be able to benefit from it.
“He played an important part in a people smuggling enterprise which saw migrants treated as a commodity to be profited from, transporting them from Vietnam to the UK.
“This case demonstrates that not only will we investigate and bring to justice those involved in organised immigration crime, we will also follow the money and stop criminals profiting from their wrongdoing.”
