Par
Veronique Weber
Published on Nov. 17, 2024 at 11:54 a.m.
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They assure it and repeat it before the court of Dieppe (Seine-Maritime) this Friday, November 15, 2024: they regret their actions and were not aware of the repercussions.
They are the two passers who were arrested on Tuesday November 12 when boarding the ferry in Dieppe towards England. They had a migrantan Afghan in his thirties, without documents and speaking neither French nor English, hidden in the trunk of their rental car.
The two smugglers recruited on Snapchat
The two young women are from the Paris region and have been friends since this summer. The driver, aged 29, told the court that she had been approached by someone on the social network Snapchat in order to carry out a “not risky” mission for remuneration, namely to take a migrant across the Channel by ferry.
“He told me that I only risked being banned from entering England if I was arrested,” she recalls. I trusted him. It seemed easy and risk-free to me. It wasn’t drugs and I didn’t think I was committing a crime. »
Once in England, she should have recover €7,000 with a person, before bringing this sum back to someone else in France. She saw herself promised a remuneration of €1,000. A godsend for someone who has debts to her family, and who, currently in a trial period in a cold calling company, is afraid of not seeing her contract extended.
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She describes herself as “very manipulatable”.
She rents a car and pays the tickets
Once the task is accepted, it communicates with the sponsor via the encrypted messaging app Signal. Application that she deletes as soon as she is arrested. She rents a car at Charles-de-Gaulle airport at her own expense and buys ferry tickets.
For the passage of the migrant, she expected to pass “a dwarf in a bag”. But when, with her 26-year-old friend with whom she decides to make the trip, she comes to pick up the man in Viry-Châtillon, they find themselves faced with an Afghan “of strong build and without a bag”.
They hesitate, but the sponsor “manages to find the right words” to reassure them, as they say to the judges. They put the man in the back of the car, and he only got into the trunk half an hour before arriving in Dieppe.
“The biggest mistake of my life”
After their arrest, and after both telling the police a version where they hitchhiked the Afghan because they felt sorry for him, they admitted the facts. The driver’s friend, when she was approached to make the trip, didn’t believe it at first. ” I had the feeling of being in a movieshe says. This is the biggest mistake of my life. »
She hesitates when they pick up the migrant, but she can’t see herself leaving her friend alone. For her, it’s almost a perverse reflex. self-destruct » to put themselves in risky situations. “I have never harmed anyone except myself,” adds the woman who receives the disabled adult allowance for a neurological illness.
“For a good cause”
“When we were arrested, we were paralyzed. That’s when we realized things,” adds the driver, who thought that this type of migrant crossing “was usual, and that people were used to doing that. I was naive. » She adds that she thought it was ” for a good cause », the migrant having expressed during the journey his desire to join family and work in a telephone store. “We thought we were doing well for him. »
“You are participating in a human trafficking network. You are putting them in danger, insisted the president of the court. Putting someone in a trunk is inhuman. » An opinion shared by the deputy public prosecutor: “He is above all a human being. Potentially, he ends up in a cave in Britain making fast meals or subjected to slavery. This is what you are participating in. It’s worse than narcotics. »
“They organized everything knowingly”
He recalls that “our jurisdiction has been assailed for many years by criminal networks”, which adapt to surveillance. “They try to make us believe that we are faced with two young, naive people, imbued with humanism. That’s not reality. They organized everything knowingly. »
Especially, he adds, that the 26-year-old defendant sent a message to her companion at 2:26 a.m., asking if there were any extensive excavations to board the ferry. “This conviction must have meaning. We must ensure that discourage little hands of these networks,” he concludes.
The prosecution requires 24 months of imprisonment for the two defendants with a committal warrant.
A sentence that the 26-year-old woman’s lawyer considers “too harsh”. “Yes it’s about naivety and unconsciousness. You have to be naive to think that you only risk inadmissibility. And it could have ended dramatically for them,” he underlines, adding that smuggling networks seek to target people who are vulnerable. He asks that the sentence, if a prison sentence were pronounced, be enforceable in the form of an electronic bracelet or adjustable.
“A gullible person”
The driver’s lawyer also believes that the requisition of the prosecution is too heavy. “It’s a special file. Most of the time, the defendants are foreigners. But the networks are changing and people are coming to look for young French people, fragile and naive. » She describes her client as “a gullible person, who is promised money. These are little hands who were fooled. » She asks for a sentence “whatever it may be”, but flexible.
The court sentences the two women to 18 months imprisonment with warrant of committal.
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