Police investigating the deaths of 19 Chinese workers who drowned when they were trapped by a rampaging night tide while picking cockles in Morecambe Bay, Lancashire, were on Friday night hunting the gangmasters behind the tragedy.
Early evidence and testimony to The Guardian from one former Chinese cockle picker who worked in Morecambe suggests the dead were working illegally for organised criminal gangs.
Rescuers pulled 19 bodies, including two women, from the waters and 16 survivors. Police said 14 were from mainland China, of whom nine were asylum seekers and five were unknown to the immigration service. Two were of white European appearance.
Detectives were having to delve into the world of cockle picking, estimated to be worth up to £8-million in the Morecambe Bay area alone, and of illegal working by Chinese migrants.
The Guardian tracked down the cockling teams to a ramshackle house in the inner-city Kensington area of Liverpool. A number of Chinese people entered and left the building, despite torrential rain on Friday night, but none was willing to talk. As many as 60 people are thought to be living in the 11-room property.
Sources in Britain’s Chinese community said that eight of the dead were from the Fujian province in south-eastern China, where people pay up to £20 000 to snakehead gangsters who smuggle them out of the country to western Europe.
On Friday morning as the full extent of the tragedy began to emerge, police took away from the beach a battered white Mercedes van, which is believed to have ferried the group there.
Although it is understood that the dead Chinese workers held the necessary permits for cockle picking, it was being suggested that they may have used forged national insurance numbers and identity documents to acquire them.
A Chinese person who used to work in Morecambe with the cockle pickers said the work was organised by a gangmaster from Fujian province.
He sent workers up to the north-west in teams of 10 or more, usually by train, where they were met by an associate of the gangmaster before being taken to their accommodation, which was often overcrowded and dangerous. Workers heard of the gangmaster by word of mouth from illegal workers in the Chinese community.
Most of the workers are Fujian, now the largest wave of undocumented Chinese migrants into Britain. Gangmasters often charge a £150 registration fee to each worker and £20 to £30 a week for accommodation.
Working hours are long and irregular. Cockle pickers can earn £300 to £400 a week, and are paid £9 a bag.
The Chinese cockle pickers turned up in the Morecambe area in the past few weeks, with the cocklebeds being ripe for harvesting from December.
Geraldine Smith, MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale, said: ”The popularity of cockling in Morecambe Bay is a relatively new thing — it has happened over the last six to 12 months. It is so terrible — their families won’t even know that they are dead. It is such an appalling human tragedy.”
Outside the house in Kensington, one neighbour, who didn’t want to be identified, said: ”There are only 11 rooms in the house, yet there are 60 people living there. We have counted them.
”They are mostly young people. They go out in the early hours — we hear the vans leaving at between 3am and 4am and we hear them shouting at one another.”
Immigration officers suspected a serious escalation of activity by the snakehead gangs early last year when they estimated that about 2 000 Chinese migrants had appeared in the King’s Lynn area of Norfolk. Most were employed in agriculture and food packing and processing.
Intelligence briefings suggested that the Chinese labourers were also being bussed across the country for jobs in various sectors. Lancashire police said they were checking whether the Chinese cockle pickers could have travelled from King’s Lynn.
Complaints from locals about Chinese cockle pickers in the Morecambe Bay area last July led to a raid on minivans carrying Chinese people in Morecambe in August. Police arrested 37 people. Rescuers in Morecambe said groups of Chinese workers have had to be saved from the sea twice in the past five weeks.
Jia He, of the Fujian community centre in London, said members of the surviving Fujian community in and around Morecambe had told him the dead were in their early to late twenties.
”The employers are responsible for their deaths, those who left them to work in dangerous conditions,” he said.
Colin McDonald, a cockling expert of Wirral Seafoods Deeside, based in Holywell, Flintshire, says the men should never have been out on the bay. McDonald stopped his team of 70 men from working on Wednesday because of the dangerous tide. He says he would never allow anybody to work at night time in Morecambe Bay.
He added: ”I only deal with fishermen who have about 20 years’ experience. We find that the Chinese come in when there are rich pickings, which there are at the moment. The middlemen don’t have the right equipment or experience to go cockling. Our people go out together on the beach in tractors and we make sure all the safety rules are followed.”
McDonald said they had just removed 250 tons of cockles from Morecambe Bay after a nine-day session. But during this time, he said the less reputable Chinese workers had removed 400 tons of cockles.
The tragedy in Morecambe follows the discovery in June 2000 of 58 dead Chinese illegal immigrants who suffocated in the back of a lorry bound for Dover from Zeebrugge in Belgium.
The dead were all from Fujian province and had paid up to £20 000 each to snakehead people traffickers, who sub-contracted the last fatal stage of the transport to a Dutch-Turkish criminal gang based in Rotterdam.
Ke Su Di, one of two men who survived, told Maidstone crown court why the dead had been willing to take such risks to reach the United Kingdom.
”In China,” he said ”life was not too good … we want to come to Britain because you can earn good money. Life is good there.”
Brian Wong, chairperson of the Liverpool Chinese Business Association, described the desperation of the illegal workers that left them open to exploitation by criminal gangs.
”Many of these immigrants are heavily in debt to snakehead gangs and must take the first job they can find to clear the money they borrowed to get here.”
Last year London solicitor Wah Piow Tan was visited by six cockle pickers who wanted his help after their gangmaster refused to pay them.
Tan said: ”There should be an amnesty for illegal immigrants, then these people can be documented and such a tragedy can be avoided as they won’t be pushed into marginal industries.”
Jabez Lam, of the Chinese rights group Min Quan, said there was real anger at the British government among the Chinese community after the tragedy, the second involving Chinese illegal immigrants in four years.
Lam said: ”This was a tragedy waiting to happen. This is a situation created by the government’s immigration and asylum policy. They are denying people the right to decent living conditions, and the right to work and housing. These people have to put themselves at risk to make a living.”
One resident in Fujian province on Friday said: ”It has nothing to do with money. Very poor people could never afford to leave the country because it can cost as much as $50,000 to get a boat to the United States or Europe.
”People from Fujian have a long history of seeking their fortune overseas. In extreme cases some villages have 80% of families with someone living overseas.”
Home Office Minister Beverley Hughes said: ”It demonstrates yet again what can happen to people when the highly organised criminal elements that are behind the trafficking in the first place — and here with mostly Chinese people we are talking about the ruthless gangs, the snakeheads and so on who operate globally and transport people for labour exploitation — at what great risk people put themselves.” — Guardian Unlimited Â