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Friday, August 13, 1999

Human smugglers could face charges in Korea

Chad Skelton
The Vancouver Sun

VANCOUVER - The eight suspected Korean smugglers who dumped 130 migrants near a deserted B.C. island face prosecution if they are returned home, the South Korean consulate in Vancouver said yesterday.

"It is a crime under the Korean criminal law,"said Consul Joonyong Park. "Aside from the penalty they receive here from the Canadian law, they could be punished by the Korean law separately if they committed the crime."

Mr. Park said the Korean law makes it a crime to organize human smuggling operations -- including operations abroad -- though he said he didn't know what the maximum penalty for that crime is.

Mr. Park said the law has been used several times because Koreans have organized numerous illegal smuggling operations to bring Chinese nationals to Korea by ship.

"Chinese people are smuggled into Korea with the co-operation of some Koreans," he said. "There are many cases of that kind in Korea."

How the migrants on this latest ship were recruited, how they paid for the journey and what arrangements had been made for their arrival here in Canada had not yet been determined by immigration officials.

But migrants aboard the last ship told investigators that they had paid up to $38,000 (US) for the journey -- an amount many of them would have likely been forced to pay off upon their arrival.

That concerns one expert who thinks it is likely that those refugee claimants who are released will likely be paid a visit by someone working for the smuggling syndicates looking to collect.

"They've got money invested in them and they want to get it back," said Sergeant Jim Fisher, an expert in Asian organized crime with the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada in Ottawa.

So far, 86 of the 123 migrants from the first boat have been released. The remaining 37 have been detained -- 17 because Immigration Canada cannot identify them and 20 who they believe were involved in the smuggling operation.

Authorities should take little comfort in the fact that they have detained the suspected ringleaders of both smuggling ships, Sgt. Fisher said. Most research on smuggling operations suggests they are "compartmentalized," he said, with different groups responsible for the recruitment, the voyage itself and collecting the debts here in North America.

"It means that if you make an arrest with those guys on the last ship, they might not be able to supply too much information about what was going to happen to them after that," Sgt. Fisher said, "because their contract was to bring them over and drop them at a specific location and meet a certain person."

Assuming each migrant paid roughly the same amount for their voyage, that makes each ship's human cargo worth more than $4-million. Sgt. Fisher said organized Asian gangs can be ruthless in making sure they are paid.

"There have been murders, there have been tortures -- to send a message to delinquent payments," he said.




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