Belgium Smashes People-Smuggling Ring

This morning we executed a series of search warrants to intercept all the suspects.

Belgian police have arrested 15 members of a people-smuggling ring who were in the process of moving more than 200 illegal immigrants from India to Britain.

Police swooped on a number of suspected safe-houses at dawn on Saturday and discovered the immigrants, some of whom had paid as much as 20,000 euros ($26,940) for the whole trip, said Tim De Wolf, an assistant prosecutor in the case.

"This morning we executed a series of search warrants to intercept all the suspects," he told Reuters.

"This operation proved this is happening on a large scale, because we found more than 200 illegal Indians," he added. "And we think we found and identified about 15 of the organisers of this smuggling of human beings."

Britain is a top destination for the immigrants because it already has a large Indian community, allowing them to blend in, but British immigration minister Phil Woolas has vowed a crack-down in the face of rising unemployment.

The raid followed a year-long investigation and caught the immigrants as they awaited the last leg of a journey that started in the Punjab region of India.

They would either pay up to 5,000 euros to travel in the trailer of a lorry driver who was aware and would try to evade police, or they could gamble by paying 2,000 euros to be smuggled into the trailer of an unsuspecting driver, said De Wolf.

"We suspect that in a year we are speaking about thousands of illegal Indians passing through Belgium to the UK," said De Wolf.