New Zealand a destination of choice for people smugglers

By EUGENE BINGHAM

With the 4-month-old twin girls bundled up against the unfamiliar cool climate, the Middle Eastern family shuffled off the plane and nervously headed towards border control.

For a Sunday afternoon, Auckland International Airport was busy as the passengers from flight TG991 from Thailand spilled into the passenger arrival area.

Lida Rahimi, the diminutive 24-year-old mother of the twins, and her brother, Javed Ahmadi, had fled Afghanistan under cover of night and were about to seek asylum in New Zealand.

These were frightening times but first one of the twins, Tina, needed changing. Lida took her into the women's toilets, leaving her 18-year-old brother looking after her other daughter, Nina.

Javed's heartbeat quickened when a policeman interrupted his cooing to his niece. With limited English, he could not fully understand what the blue-uniformed man wanted. But Javed realised he must be asking for his passport.

"No, no passport," he told the constable.

"Where's your mother?" the constable asked.

Javed pointed towards the toilet.

Lida had just finished changing Tina when a policewoman came in. Lida started panicking, but to her relief the policewoman smiled.

"They looked so welcoming," she would later recall of the people who dealt with her that day. Still, she did not let her guard drop.

Lida remembered the words of her husband, Sarwar, before he put them on the plane to New Zealand: "You are walking towards freedom. We have to be careful."

At border control, the family threw itself at the mercy of the New Zealand Immigration Service. An officer phoned for a Dari language translator while others offered Lida and Javed hot coffee and fries. Someone helped them bathe the twins.

An hour later, Lida and the translator were taken to one side to fill in the refugee application form.

In an emotional session, she recalled how her husband, Sarwar, had suffered at the hands of mujahideen torturers because of his work for a notorious Afghan secret police force, Khad, and membership of a leftist party, Khalq.

Meanwhile Javed, a skinny 18-year-old with thick black hair and a long, rutted face that betrayed the burden of his responsibilities, looked after the twins.

When it was his turn, authorities took him off to complete the 18-page form.

On his way, Lida repeated her husband's advice: "Listen, I'm telling you now. We have got to be careful - our future depends on this interview."

In later interviews, the family members would sob as they told their heart-wrenching - and totally fabricated - story.

S IX years after their furtive arrival in Auckland, the family were happily settled in the suburb of Hillsborough, a 10-minute drive from the airport, where they rented a two-storey house down a right-of-way in Kelsey Cres.

The identical twins, Nina and Tina, bounced about the 20-year-old house like any playful New Zealand children.

The twins now had a 2-year-old brother, Emman, born about a year after their father, Sarwar, joined Lida in Auckland in July 1996.

While Javed had spent some time at Mt Albert Grammar School when he first arrived, he had recently moved into business, working at Big Fresh in St Lukes and Gilmours grocery wholesalers before taking over the running of a busy Papakura restaurant, the Istanbul Cafe.

Much to the disapproval of his sister - who had taken on the role of his mother - Javed was staying with his girlfriend, but he counted Lida and Sarwar's house as his family home.

Just after breakfast on a Monday morning in March 2000, loud knocking at the door stirred the household.

Outside, several carloads of policemen were waiting, armed with a search warrant. Operation Amid, the police codename for an investigation into an alleged crime syndicate, was kicking into action.

Around Auckland that day, more than 20 houses and businesses were raided. Police took away bundles of documents from Kelsey Cres including an envelope of film negatives of Javed, Lida and Sarwar.

By the end of the day, the head of the police inquiry, Detective Sergeant Craig Turley, would start cataloguing more than 7000 seized documents.

Turley, a 16-year veteran of the force, believed a criminal syndicate of Iranians and Afghans had been involved in people smuggling, trafficking more than 1000 Iraqis, Iranians, Afghans and Pakistanis into New Zealand and Australia. The ringleaders were "ghosts with multiple identities".

Word of the raids spread quickly through the small Afghan community in Auckland. Many were refugees living quiet lives barely noticed by the wider community. But that anonymity was doomed. Over the following two years, a series of events would drag the Afghan community into the spotlight.

When Turley sifted through the documents - personal letters, travel papers, photographs, maps, phone records - he realised his team had captured a goldmine of information about the extent of the smuggling and New Zealand's links with it.

"More than that, it was the personal documentation of the players involved which outlines their backgrounds and methods," said an immigration source.

The files revealed payments - in one example, millions of dollars had passed through a modest Auckland business. They revealed how smugglers obtained false documents - through thefts and forgery; how smugglers and their customers would discuss the merits of particular countries. In one exchange, New Zealand was talked of as offering "free money".

Some of the documents also threw up an unexpected - and worrisome - concern about the background of some of New Zealand's recent arrivals. The discovery of a map of Sydney with the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor highlighted, a notebook setting out how New Zealand anti-terrorist units would respond to an emergency, and satellite phone records prompted police to set up a separate, parallel inquiry called Operation Beaver.

But the focus of the investigation remained on understanding people smuggling and identifying the ghostly ringleaders.

A scan through appeals to the Refugee Status Appeals Authority reveals that many people who come here as refugees have used the services of unnamed agents - smugglers who help to slip people out of their country, through Asia and into New Zealand. For many of the refugees, this is their only choice, an opportunity to escape.

Hundreds are deemed genuine. But the immigration figures also show that not all are - only one in five of the people who apply are judged genuine enough. The figures also show that in the mid-1990s, the numbers of people throwing themselves at New Zealand's mercy sky-rocketed. From 1993/1994 to 1998/1999, the number of asylum-seekers went from about 500 to more than 3000.

A S THE hunt for ghosts went on, investigators found a number of people living in Auckland who were heavily involved in the trade during the peaks of the 1990s. One man in particular came in for close attention - Australian authorities, too, were interested in his connections and background.

While he has never been charged with people smuggling, the Weekend Herald has spoken to sources in the community aware of a 20-year career that began during the Iran-Iraq war.

At first, he led people across the Iranian border into Pakistan for the good of it. Then he started charging. About 10 years ago, he moved to Malaysia and helped to smuggle people around the world as part of a syndicate headed by a kingpin known to Western agencies.

During this time, the man estimates he sent 200 people to New Zealand and 1000 to Europe. Several years later, he employed agents of his own in Iran and had them send people to him in Asia. About 500 people were illegally sent to New Zealand and Canada in this phase of his business.

During the mid-1990s, he moved to New Zealand himself, although he continued to smuggle some people. The Weekend Herald has learned of one Auckland refugee family who paid him about $20,000 to get their relatives to New Zealand from the Middle East. That deal turned sour when the family's relatives were arrested in Indonesia.

Community sources also revealed other disputes between the man and business associates in Auckland. In March last year, he was abducted, taken to an Avondale park, told to pray his last, and stabbed in the backside. He had fallen out with another smuggler over a debt.

The Weekend Herald has also spoken to people who say that he had business dealings with another notorious smuggler. That man, who obtained refugee status and was granted New Zealand citizenship himself, is now based in Indonesia and was one of the agents involved in putting the Tampa refugees to sea bound for Australia.

Despite spending months investigating these New Zealand connections to the trafficking trade, police were struggling to charge anyone. There was plenty of evidence of a well-organised trade in desperate people but the ghosts were proving impossible to pin down.

Lawyers familiar with the investigations say there were problems with the admissibility and nature of the evidence.

Other sources suggest the police inquiry fizzled because of the inadequacies of New Zealand legislation. The limpness of the law in this area has been recognised by the Government, which introduced changes to Parliament in February making people smugglers liable to prison sentences of up to 20 years.

"Police were in the position where it was pointless to proceed with criminal cases," said one immigration source. "It was felt that it was better to deal with it within the Immigration Service."

B Y the time that decision was made, however, police had moved against three people they suspected of having deliberately lied to obtain asylum - Sarwar and Lida Rahimi and her brother, Javed Ahmadi. Something about their story did not ring true.

It was those photographs found in the brown envelope in Kelsey Cres that prompted most suspicion. All three of the refugees had claimed to have come to New Zealand on a fairly direct route. But the photographs - taken a year before Lida and Javed's arrival in Auckland - showed them at the Eden Seaview Village, the Park Royal Hotel, a country club golf course and at other picture postcard spots around Penang, Malaysia.

Lida, her eyelids dabbed with heavy makeup, posed against a tree. Sarwar, barefoot and in shorts, stood on a beach. In their dealings with New Zealand immigration officials, none of them had disclosed their 11-month stay in Malaysia.

Instead, when Javed and Lida arrived in April 1994, they had claimed to have left Afghanistan with the twins about 25 days earlier.

They had also invented details about Sarwar's past. Sarwar told authorities he had been an army lieutenant under the Soviet-controlled Afghan regime in the 1980s. To help with his promotion chances, he said, he had joined Khalq, the People's Democratic Party. He also claimed to have been forced to join a military division of the Afghan secret police, Khad.

After the fall of the communist regime in 1992, mujahideen factions took control of the country. Sarwar claimed he was arrested and beaten by the mujahideen because of his work for the fallen government. During his seven months in captivity, he said he was hung upside down and told to supply the names of associates, punched in the mouth, and beaten with a cable on his right lower leg.

His story was enough to deceive the Refugee Status Appeals Authority during a day-long hearing in July, 1999.

"The authority found the appellant to be an impressive witness," it said in its written decision granting Sarwar asylum. "His tearfulness, for example, when describing how he was able to be released from detention by the mujahideen to visit his wife and children was consistent with someone who had been severely beaten and threatened and who was extremely concerned for the welfare of his own family with whom he was desperate to be reunited.

"As to the beatings he received, the appellant was able to provide corroborative evidence by showing the authority a scar on his leg, where he said he had been struck by a cable, and also a gap in his teeth caused by being punched by mujahideen members. His evidence was detailed and had real depth to it."

But for the discovery of the photographs from Malaysia, Sarwar's life as a tortured former Khad officer may have remained a reality, at least in the eyes of New Zealand.

Instead, during a midnight interview at the Henderson police station after a long night of questioning, the family was confronted with photographic evidence of their deception.

Sarwar and Lida eventually pleaded guilty to making false statements in their refugee application forms. Javed pleaded not guilty and faced a three-day trial in the Auckland District Court last week.

Sarwar and Lida were called to give evidence against him.

Speaking softly but confidently through a court translator, Sarwar told the jury he had, in fact, spent very little time in Afghanistan over the past few decades. He left Afghanistan as a teenager and travelled through Turkey, Pakistan and Iran. For several years, he lived in Malaysia using a Pakistani passport in the name Bahram Ali.

Wearing tidy black trousers and a cream-coloured, short-sleeved polo shirt, Sarwar told the unromantic story of his 1992 marriage.

While living in Iran, he had seen a picture of Lida, who at that stage was living with her family in the western Afghan city of Herat. Sarwar asked his family to check her out and seek Lida's family for permission to marry her. It was his second marriage - he had split from his first wife about seven years earlier.

Asked in court if Lida had a say in the proposal, Sarwar replied: "It's a custom in Afghanistan that women have got no right to say anything." He shrugged his shoulders when asked if he could remember when the wedding took place. But then he could not remember his own birthday, either. He thought he was born around February 1957, but such dates were not important, Sarwar explained.

For all Sarwar's flatness in the witness box, Lida was full of emotion. At 32, she was 13 years the junior of her husband - give or take a year. Dressed in black, with short black hair, stud earrings and a gold chain, she broke down in tears several times during her evidence. While she had the assistance of a translator, too, Lida would break into rapid, heavily accented English, spitting out machinegun bursts of sentences about what she had been through and how she had only wanted a better life for herself and her family.

Lida said that when she married, her mother entrusted her brother Javed into Sarwar's care too, saying: "You are a man. You look after my little man."

A few months after the wedding, Lida, Sarwar and Javed went to Pakistan for several weeks before flying to Malaysia. Lida said their lives dangled in the balance while they were there - an agent had promised to get them passage to a friendly country, but they did not know where they would end up or when they were leaving. Lida also suffered in the humid Malaysian climate because she was pregnant.

In late 1993, the trio drove to Thailand. The twins were born at the Bangkok Adventist Hospital on December 9, 1993, Tina first, then Nina, a little smaller and sicker than her sister.

Records showed their mother called herself Layla Ahmadiy Nujjapee, a 22-year-old Iranian. The false details were not the only deception surrounding the twins' birth. Until the court cases, the girls were told they were born in Afghanistan, in line with the story told to New Zealand immigration authorities.

After the birth, the family returned to Malaysia before Sarwar decided to send his wife, children and brother-in-law to seek refuge. They drove to a Thai resort airport. Lida and Javed checked in for their Bangkok-Sydney-Auckland flight using French passports which they handed back to an agent before departure.

Once her refugee status was granted in December 1994, Lida tried to have officials give Sarwar the right to join his family in Auckland. In June 1995 he applied for a visitor's visa but was turned down. Lida appealed to the Minister of Immigration for help and tried to get the Holmes television show to feature her plight.

The pleas failed, so Lida flew to Indonesia to bring her husband back. She took Javed's passport. In it, they inserted Sarwar's photograph and boarded a Garuda Airlines flight to Auckland. Nine days after passing through border control with his brother-in-law's passport, Sarwar applied for asylum.

In court last week, Javed's lawyer, Murray Gibson, pleaded for the jury to consider where his client had come from - a country where he was likely to be called upon for military service, a home where family members had been killed during the fighting of 20 years of war and oppression.

"These people ... were classic refugees," said Gibson. "[Javed] could not go back. He would have been given over to the mujahideen who would take very unfavourable consideration of people who had tried to flee the country."

Gibson also suggested it was Sarwar who was "the moving force in all this mischief".

"Javed Ahmadi is a person who has made great personal progress but in 1994 he was a naive inexperienced young man," said Gibson.

His pleadings held some sway with the jury. Their guilty verdict came with a rider - a strong recommendation for leniency when Javed is sentenced on June 6.

For Lida, the verdict brought her to tears again. "This is all my fault," she said. "When I look at his face in those photographs, he was just a boy."

- additional reporting by JOHN ANDREWS