William Moliné, edited by Alexandre Dalifard
modified to
7:25 a.m., November 15, 2022
French, British, Belgian and Dutch police are looking for one of the biggest human traffickers sentenced to 10 years in prison last month in Belgium. Barzan Kamal Majeed, nicknamed “Scorpion”, is suspected of having smuggled around a hundred migrants to British shores.
Looking for… “Scorpion”! The NCA, the national agency against crime in England has just launched an appeal for witnesses to try to locate Barzan Kamal Majeed, a 36-year-old Iraqi, suspected of being at the head of a vast network of smugglers. He has been in the sights of European investigators, including those of the French, for several years now. The police gave him the nickname “Scorpion” because they discovered in the phones of the migrants that his phone number was referenced under this pseudonym.
This joint investigation targets a hundred illegal crossings between July 2018 and November 2019, on board makeshift boats, trucks and shipping containers.
10 years in prison and nearly a million euros fine
In total, 31 crossings recorded over this period are attributed to the network of “Scorpion” which was expelled in 2015 from the United Kingdom to Iraqi Kurdistan. Since then, the European police have lost track of him. He was sentenced in his absence last month by the court of Bruges in Belgium to 10 years in prison and a fine of 968,000 euros. Among his accomplices, 17 of them were found guilty and imprisoned.
In a press release, Martin Clarke, the head of the NCA called on “anyone, anywhere, with information on the whereabouts of Barzan Kamal Majeed to contact us or immediately contact the Belgian authorities”. Before adding: “Although he was convicted in absentia, real justice will only be served when he returns to Belgian soil to serve his prison sentence.”