Three men have been jailed for running a racket that supplied fugitive drug traffickers and murderers with “genuine” passports.
Christopher Zietek, 67, and Alan Thompson, 72, were found guilty in March, after a nine-week trial, while Anthony Beard, 61, pleaded guilty on the eve of his trial.
Jailing them at Reading Crown Court on Tuesday, Judge Nicholas Ainley said: “These passports are going to work because they’re genuine. They will pass any checks by the Border Force. They subvert the whole system.”
He said, “It was to enable very wicked, sophisticated, violent criminals to escape justice by providing them with documents that because they were genuine would deceive the authorities to enable them to escape.”…