DETAILS have emerged of how human-smugglers ran a multi-million-pound business from their homes in Enfield.

Halil Karakus, 28, of Grampian House, in Plevna Road, Edmonton, was jailed with other gang members for three years on June 10.

Previously, another gang member, 49-year-old Zeynel Yazici, of Connaught Gardens, Palmers Green, had also been jailed for four years.

They were part of a Turkish gang, who had arrived in the UK as asylum-seekers at least ten years ago, working with people-smugglers to transport desperate Chinese nationals to the UK in a gruelling and often dangerous journey that could take 18 months.

The gang were convicted following a year-long police operation and arrested in January after a series of dawn raids involving hundreds of officers.

Detectives cracked the network by following the suspects from their Enfield homes to Manor House Tube, and observed them meeting their Chinese counterparts.

Detective Sergeant Richard Southwell, of the Metropolitan Police's Special Intelligence Section, said the gang were able to transport Chinese immigrants across Asia, Africa and Europe through “extremely organised networks” of Turkish communities in those countries.

The immigrants paid £21,000 each to be smuggled into the UK. In the year the operation ran, detectives witnessed between five and ten immigrants exchanged a week, meaning the gangs were taking as much as £10 million a year.

Det Sgt Southwell, said: “I think it's a commodity. It's a money-making enterprise where the commodity happens to be people.

“It makes no difference to them. They don't pay particular attention to the care of these people.”

On two occasions, immigration officers at Dover found women stuffed into cramped spaces in the boots of cars who had been drugged to keep them quiet.

Det Sgt Southwell said as far as he knew none of the smuggled Chinese were brought to Enfield.

After the Turks smuggled the immigrants into Britain they were given to Chinese gang members in Trafalgar Square and taken to established Chinese communities in Peckham, where they disappeared.

He added: “One address had about 35 Chinese immigrants in it and hundreds and thousands of DVDs.

"They were being used to work in the illegal DVD industry to pay off some of their debts.

“That was a staging post. A lot of them would disappear off to other communities across the UK, laundries and Chinese restaurants.”

He said there was no way of telling how many had disappeared; the smuggling was the gang's full-time occupation that they had been involved in “for a considerable amount of time”.

He said: “They never register in the system. Unless they are detained for some reason, they disappear and are never heard from again again. There's probably thousands of them.

“We saw 95 Chinese immigrants over the course of the operation, but we weren't watching them every minute of the day.”

Det Sgt Southwell said he was very pleased the judge at Southwark Crown Court had handed down the maximum sentence.

In sentencing, the judge said the people-smugglers had abused the trust of the UK in coming here.