Tracking down Scorpion, Europe’s most wanted migrant-smuggler

Barzan Majeed looked like an affluent golfer. He was smartly dressed, in new jeans, a light-blue shirt and a black gilet.

When he put his hands on the table, I saw his fingernails were manicured.

Meanwhile, three men took a seat at a nearby table. His security team, we guessed.

Once more, he denied being a big player at the top of a criminal organisation. He said other gang members had tried to implicate him.

“A couple of people, when they get arrested, they say, ‘We’re working for him’. They want to get less sentence.”

He also seemed bitter that other smugglers had been given British passports and carried on their trade.

“In three days, one guy sent 170 or 180 people from Turkey to Italy, still holding a British passport!” he says. “I want to go to some other country to do business. I can’t.”

When we pressed him about his responsibility for migrant deaths, he repeated what he had said on the phone – that he just took the money and booked places.

For him, a smuggler was someone who loaded the people onto boats and lorries and transported them: “I never put anybody in a boat and I never kill anybody.”

The conversation ended, but Scorpion invited Rob to see the money exchange he worked from in Sulaymaniyah.

It was a small office – there was some writing in Arabic on the window and a couple of mobile phone numbers. People came here to pay for passage. Rob said that while he was there he saw a man carrying a box full of cash.

On this occasion, Scorpion talked about how he got into the business in 2016, when many thousands of people were heading into Europe.

“Nobody forced them. They wanted to,” he said. “They were begging the smugglers, ‘Please, please do this for us.’ Sometimes the smugglers say, ‘Just because of the sake of God, I will help them’. And then they complain, they say, ‘Oh this, that…’ No, this is not true.”