Two men found guilty of smuggling migrants to Essex
National Crime Agency/PATwo men have been found guilty of people smuggling after using a plane to illegally transport economic migrants.
Myrteza Hilaj, 50, and Kreshnik Kadena, 37, both of Leyton, east London, were found guilty of facilitating the commission of a breach of immigration law.
Migrants were flown from northern France to Epping Forest, Essex, and supplied with fake documents.
The men are due to be sentenced at Southwark Crown Court in May.
The convictions of the men followed an eight-year investigation led by the National Crime Agency (NCA) into an Albanian organised-crime group involved in facilitating illegal migration, money laundering, drug trafficking and the supply of counterfeit documents.
The investigation, under the codename Operation Micropus, found at least nine journeys of Albanian economic migrants in 2016 and 2017 were "linked" to Hilaj.
Three of these involved a light aircraft, others with migrants getting into the back of lorries.
Kadena was primarily involved in smuggling migrants using a light aircraft and acted as Hilaj's assistant, the court heard.
'Travel agent'
The group operated with a pilot, taking off from North Weald Airfield in Epping Forest, Essex, before flying to Le Touquet airport in northern France.
From there a group of three or four migrants were smuggled back from northern France to Stapleford Aerodrome Airfield in Epping Forest, where the migrants would be collected by Kadena.
The NCA said these migrants would pay "up to £10,000" for transit and then extra money for fake documents - many of which Hilaj supplied from a false identity counterfeiting group.
Saju Sasikumar, NCA senior investigating officer, described Hilaj as acting like a "travel agent".
He said: "He was putting people in the right places at the right time and contacting the right people to get them to where they needed to be."
They were both arrested by the NCA at their homes on 26 July 2017.
The investigation led by the NCA saw 27 arrests - 11 convictions in the UK and nine overseas.
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