People smugglers are charging migrants £7,000 for guaranteed passage into Britain through a loophole in the Common Travel Area between Ireland and Northern Ireland — the same route allegedly used by the Sudanese man charged with the Belfast knife attack that has triggered two nights of rioting across the UK.
According to The Telegraph, Albanian smuggling gangs are advertising the route on social media as a safer alternative to small boat Channel crossings, with adverts promising guaranteed success. One post read: “Every day, only success. Reserve your place. Guaranteed passage to England.” Another stated: “Route to the UK. You pay after you arrive. Maximum safety/security. No messing around — if you’re serious and want to come, message me.”
The smugglers reportedly provide migrants with fake Italian ID cards to fly into Ireland, before transporting them across the open border into Northern Ireland — a journey that involves no immigration checks under the Common Travel Area, an arrangement that has existed for over a century and is regarded as essential to maintaining peace between nationalist and unionist communities.
Hadi Alodid, 30, the Sudanese national charged with the attempted murder of Stephen Ogilvie — who lost his left eye in Monday’s attack — is believed to have used this exact route. Police said Alodid travelled approximately 2,753 miles from Sudan to Paris before flying to Dublin and taking a bus to Belfast in February 2023, a journey on which he would have been unlikely to face any document checks.
The scale of the problem is laid bare in Home Office figures showing Northern Ireland houses more than 2,300 asylum seekers — 2.5 per cent of the UK total — while just one asylum seeker has been returned to Ireland since a post-Brexit deal in 2020. The Common Travel Area has been described as Britain’s “Achilles’ heel.”
The Sun previously reported in February that migrants who fled the UK for Ireland fearing deportation under the Rwanda scheme had been returning with no checks once that policy was scrapped by the incoming Labour government. At the 2024 peak, around 80 per cent of new asylum claimants in Ireland had travelled from the UK. A subsequent Sun on Sunday investigation found a string of TikTok videos openly bragging about how migrants could slip into Britain via Ireland.
Jonathan Hall KC, the Government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said immigration needed to be considered through a national security lens. “If people from certain countries are more likely either to commit very serious offences or particular offences, or to get involved with state threat activity, do we need to start thinking about migration now, not simply in terms of the economy and housing, but also in terms of national security? I think it’s absolutely necessary to talk about immigration in the context of national security,” he said.
Labour Party chairwoman Anna Turley confirmed ministers were actively discussing how to close the loophole. “If people are exploiting the common travel agreement in this way, that’s not acceptable. That’s not what it’s there for,” she told Sky News. “It’s been in existence for over 100 years and it’s absolutely right that people can travel between the island and Northern Ireland freely. It’s really important we make sure we have a fair system led by data and intelligence, and that people are not able to exploit the asylum system.”
Belfast remains under heavy police presence following two consecutive nights of disorder triggered by Monday’s attack, with the violence having since spread to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Ayr and Southampton.
