A young ‘bedoun’ from Kuwait is currently being tried before a British court on charges including participation in facilitating the smuggling of a number of illegal immigrants to England using a rubber dinghy last March.
According to what has been published in the English newspaper ‘Daily Mail’, the young man identified only as (A.T.) did not carry any identification papers when he was caught red-handed, but he claimed to belong to the bedoun category in Kuwait, and claimed he was only 17 years old. The judge then decided to place him in a juvenile care home.
However, the same judge announced during a session day before yesterday that investigations and blood tests showed his real age is 20 years, not 17 as he claimed.
During the confessional hearing that took place in the English Canterbury Court, the young man defended himself, saying that he did not intend to lie when he said that he was 17 years old. He explained he did not know his real age because he did not know how to read and write, and that he arrived in Europe illegally more than two years ago.
The young man said that at the beginning of his illegal immigration to Europe, he first arrived in Greece, where he spent 18 months, and then took to organizing smuggling of migrants operations to other European countries, including England.
Although Judge Mark Wakes did not initially reject the young man’s justifications regarding his inability to determine his true age, and that he was not a member of an organized gang to smuggle people, he refused to grant the young man the right to remain in England, indicating that it would be possible to deport him from England (to Kuwait) once the trial is over.