Priti Patel, Britain’s Home Secretary, has claimed that Albanians are coming to the UK illegally in the hopes of joining the country’s “criminal underworld”.
Boatloads of illegal Albanians are landing in Britain so they can join the country’s “criminal underworld”, the UK’s Home Secretary Priti Patel has claimed.
Patel has meanwhile hailed a new agreement she has drummed up between UK and Albanian authorities that will police from the Muslim majority European state serving in Britain, despite the fact that Albanian police have been repeatedly embroiled in criminal corruption scandals.
According to a report by The Telegraph, Patel lambasted criminal migrants coming to Britain for Albania as asylum shoppers on Tuesday, saying that the only reason illegals from the country are coming to Britain is to join up with criminal gangs.
“It is shameful and absurd that so many Albanian nationals are entering the UK via small boats when their home country, Albania, is a safe country,” Patel is reported as saying in the wake of the surge of boat migrants arriving from the country.
“These Albanian nationals are brought here illegally by organised criminal networks travelling through multiple EU countries,” she continued.
“They are asylum shopping, making attempts to claim asylum in the UK in the hope that they can remain here and disappear into the criminal underworld fuelled by Albanian gangs,” the home secretary went on to claim, before declaring that she would “bring this to an end”.
Despite having repeatedly failed to remotely get a handle on the boat migrant crisis up until this point, Patel this time appears to be adamant that she will be able to drastically reduce the number of Albanian arrivals with her new rapid deportation agreement that she has drummed up with the Muslim country’s authorities.
According to The Telegraph, such a move will see Albanian law enforcement stationed in Dover to do background checks on arrivals, while British officers will meanwhile be allowed to operate in Albania for the purpose of engaging in further border control efforts.
However, what seemingly has not been discussed is Albania’s extensive history of political corruption, with the Muslim-majority state’s police force having been repeatedly embroiled in corruption scandals frequently involving cooperation with organised crime gangs.
For example, three senior police officers were arrested in 2021, along with other senior government officials, on charges relating to drug offences, corruption, abuse of post, and money laundering.
According to a statement on the arrest given by an Albanian police force at the time, the officers were suspected to have “guaranteed” the shipment of drugs remained uninterrupted, and that in some cases, the drugs being trafficked under their noses were actually allegedly owned by the corrupt officials themselves.
It is unclear whether Patel is concerned about such a history of corruption, or whether the Home Office has a plan for dealing with the possibility of having corrupt foreign police actively operating on British soil.
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