Friday 23 September 2022 10:38 PM Human trafficker brazenly leads a 70-strong line of Iraqis and Iranians before ... trends now

Breakfast time in Dunkirk, and a human trafficker in a black top brazenly marches a large crowd of migrants along a street busy with French shoppers buying their baguettes.

Displaying all the confidence of an official tourist guide, he leads his throng to a local bus stop. There the 70 or so Iraqis and Iranians — some with little children on their shoulders — join him on board for the hour-long road-trip to the beach where a black rubber boat waits to take them illegally to England.

This was the scene on Wednesday morning at the French port, even though plenty of gendarmes were on patrol to stop this latest addition to the flow of illegal migrants crossing the Channel from France.

What we witnessed shows that the migrant crisis on the north French coast is now out of control. Numbers reaching Britain have topped 31,000 this year, and historic Dunkirk — the scene of an iconic evacuation of more than 300,000 British and French troops during the war — is in the grip of traffickers who conduct their multi-million-pound people trade with impunity and no fear of the authorities.

We watched the trafficker and his paying customers over four hours that day, first spotting the group walking fast along a road leading from the migrants’ tented camp a few miles outside Dunkirk.

We saw them reach the bus stop at a shopping mall on the town’s fringes. They waited there for a few minutes before boarding the C2 bus at 9.40am and travelling the four miles to Fort des Dunes in the nearby seaside town of Leffrinckoucke.

The bus was so full of migrants, with all seats and standing room taken, that the French people hoping to board in Dunkirk and at stops en route had to wait for the next bus to come along.

When I talked to the bus driver, a young Frenchman with a hipster beard, to ask whether he thought his passengers were really migrants, he told me clearly: ‘Clandestins allant en Angleterre’ (‘Illegals going to England’). Rolling his eyes wearily, he warned me not to get on, but to wait for the next bus on the same route 15 minutes later, with fewer passengers.

An hour later, after tracking his C2 bus out of Dunkirk, we observed the trafficker’s group get off at a stop in a narrow street in Fort des Dunes called Rue de 2 Juin 1940, named to commemorate France’s own military deaths in Leffrinckoucke during the Dunkirk evacuation.

The migrants emerged from the vehicle, still being led by the trafficker who guided them over the road carefully via a zebra crossing. They headed for a tiny footbridge spanning an inter-city railway line, which drops down into a housing estate in Leffrinckoucke. With the trafficker still in front, the migrants briskly passed terrace houses with Gallic names such as one celebrating the novelist Emile Zola.

A quarter of an hour later, they had reached the wooden gate of a nature park full of trees, a favourite of local dog walkers and hikers, called Dune Dewulf.

Myriad tracks lead through the

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