Albanian ‘people smuggling gang Mr Big’ fighting deportation from UK ‘as it would breach his human rights’
AN Albanian alleged to be a people-smuggling gang’s Mr Big says he should not be deported as he does not like Belgian jails.
Adriatik Hysenlika is facing extradition from the UK to serve a ten-year jail sentence.
But he claims deportation would deny him access to his two-year-old son, who was born here.
His lawyers also say it would breach his human rights as jails in Belgium are overcrowded.
Hysenlika, 43, arrived in Britain in 1998, claiming he was being persecuted in Albania.
He was granted a UK passport in 2007.
But he is said to have raked in at least £1million as the head of a trafficking gang that smuggled illegal migrants into the country hidden in the back of lorries.
Each are thought to have paid up to £23,000.
Hysenlika, of Willesden, North West London, was arrested by the National Crime Agency last August after a request from Belgian authorities, where he had been sentenced in absentia for 60 immigration offences.
Court documents seen by The Sun on Sunday state he was the “leader of a criminal organisation that is, on a large scale and making use of a vast network”.
His gang was said to have been involved in smuggling migrants from Albania and Greece through Belgium, France and the Netherlands into the UK.
Hysenlika is in London’s Wandsworth jail and an application has been made to strip him of his UK citizenship.
Meanwhile, Office for National Statistics figures show Albanians are the most arrested nationality per head of population.
For every 1,000, 209.8 have been arrested.
In comparison, 12 out of every 1,000 Brits are arrested.
In 2023, 3,926 foreign offenders were deported from the UK, of which 37 per cent were Albanian.