PHNOM PENH - Birmingham Crown Court jailed Duc Quang Ta for eight years on July 10 for helping smuggle 22 Vietnamese nationals into Britain, the Crown Prosecution Service said.

Ta, 36, was convicted in February following a 16-day trial. Jurors found that he and co-defendant Sarfaraz Sardarzehi facilitated unlawful immigration between August 18 and September 6, 2020, following an investigation by the National Crime Agency.

The National Crime Agency said the group kept migrants in safehouses, mostly in Belgium, until space became available in lorries. The vehicles travelled to Britain by ferry or through the Channel Tunnel, and the migrants were then moved inland by car. Ta helped match people with available lorry spaces and arranged drivers, vehicles and safehouses.

Thomas Short, a CPS specialist prosecutor, said: “The Vietnamese migrants they smuggled into the UK endured long journeys, some of them in the back of refrigerated lorries.”

Police arrested Ta after stopping a BMW near Leatherhead, Surrey, on September 3, 2020. They recovered £55,020 from a bag inside the vehicle and another £1,000 from Ta. 

Messages found on his phone discussed the money and arrangements to pay people involved in transporting migrants. Ta received a separate three-year term for possessing criminal property, to run concurrently with his eight-year sentence.

Police stopped Sardarzehi near Birmingham the following day with three Vietnamese men in his car. He initially said he had picked them up from the street, but investigators found that he knew they had recently entered the country unlawfully. Sardarzehi, 58, received a two-year prison sentence that was suspended.

Three other members of the same conspiracy were convicted in December 2022 and November 2023. Two received prison terms of seven-and-a-half years and five-and-a-half years, and the third received a suspended two-year term with additional requirements.