The search goes on…
Sue Mitchell and Rob Lawrie are back on dangerous turf hunting down a new people-smuggling chief
Pishdaad Modaressi Chahardehi
- Michael Hodges
To Catch a King is on Wednesday at 9.30am on Radio 4. Add it to your collection now
Ad
The hardest thing for Rob Lawrie was video-calling the father of a drowned migrant. “I knew his son had died, but I couldn’t tell him for certain,” says Lawrie, recalling the moment he and Sue Mitchell, making their new people-smuggling podcast To Catch a King, contacted the family of a young Iraqi Kurd who had disappeared while attempting to cross the channel to England. “There were probably close to 100 people on that boat. If someone goes overboard, no one’s going to see it, everyone just wants to stay alive. I was trying to give him hope when there wasn’t any hope, but as we talked I saw the realisation dawning in his eyes. It’s one of the most heartbreaking conversations I’ve ever had in my life.”
Lawrie, a 59-year-old British Army veteran from West Yorkshire, admits a tendency to get emotionally involved in his work. That is how his professional relationship with Mitchell began. Lawrie was delivering aid to the Jungle camp near Calais in 2015 when he attempted to take a four-year-old Afghan girl, Bru, back to England at her father’s request and was caught. The resulting French trial, where Lawrie was cleared of people-smuggling, brought journalist Mitchell to his front door in Leeds.
The two made the 2020 podcast Girl Taken about Bru, then followed it in 2022 with The Smugglers’ Trail, a series investigating the wider people-smuggling trade, which won an Arias award. Their 2024 podcast To Catch a Scorpion, where Mitchell and Lawrie hunted the Kurdish Iraqi smuggler Barzan Majeed (aka “the Scorpion”), led to Majeed’s arrest in May 2024 and won the Prix Europa, Prix Italia and gold at the British Podcast Awards. It also led in part, Mitchell believes, to the British government re-engaging with the Iraqi Kurdish authorities – “We paved the way for that, and it was amazing, because they did get some arrests out there.”
Sue Mitchell and Rob Lawrie won an Aria award for their series The Smugglers' Trail. Charlie Walker Charlie Walker
The last time I spoke to Lawrie and Mitchell, in 2024, we were at a camp outside Dunkirk on the trail of the Scorpion’s lieutenants. I had been nervous then, but returning to the French camps for the new podcast, Lawrie and Mitchell found the danger increased. “It feels much more frightening,” says Mitchell, “but Rob is always calm and he clocks when people near us are armed.” In such circumstances, Lawrie says, it’s always best to withdraw. “If you see a pistol, even if it’s not aimed at you, then go.” It’s not just pistols. “There are also M40 assault rifles and Kalashnikovs hidden around that camp.”
The guns signify a change in the way things are run in the camps. “When we started, the main smugglers were there on the beaches, even piloting their own boats,” says Mitchell. “But now most operate from Iraq, the camps are run by these testosterone- driven young men who want to rise up the ladder – it feels like the Wild West.”
In this series the duo return to Iraq’s Kurdistan, an area that produces both smugglers and migrants. They are there to search for the “King”, the smuggler chief of the title, but also to visit the family of the young man lost at sea. “They didn’t have a house, just a room,” says Lawrie. “They’d sold their 20-year-old car to pay to get their son to a better life in the West. The father had put his best clothes on and they brought us food they couldn’t afford. They were so glad that we had followed the story of their son. They are just one of hundreds of families who have lost someone in the English Channel but will never know for sure, because there is no body.”
After 10 years of working together, Lawrie says that he and Mitchell are, “like a married couple constantly heading for divorce”. Mitchell, who is also lauded for her other investigative journalism, acknowledges there can be tension, especially in Iraq, a country where custom dictates that women cannot do what men do. “It’s so hard there, because the dynamic of our relationship shifts and we’re not able to be equal. Everywhere else, we’re equals. The only real fallout we’ve had was in Iraq.”
The pair’s success is based on a network of contacts that go all the way through Europe and back to Iraqi Kurdistan but, most of all, on their continuing commitment to telling the story of what migrants experience. “This work is harder than anything else I do,” says Mitchell. “It’s dangerous and it can be nerve-racking and anxiety-inducing. But it is important.”
Ad
The “boats” remains the defining political issue of our time but is rarely considered as a humanitarian disaster. Providing more money for French riot police to patrol beaches or turning an ex-RAF base into a detention centre for migrants will not change that reality. Just days after Mitchell and Lawrie left Kurdistan earlier this year, US and Israeli bombs started dropping on the region. “It’s the age-old question,” says Lawrie. “Why do people come to the West? Because the West is bombing the East.” Mitchell adds an ominous final coda. “We were told up to a million people will be trying to make their way out. It’s going to be huge.”
Authors
Michael Hodges
Ad
Ad
Subscribe for £1 per week
Too much to watch this autumn? Let Radio Times magazine and app do the choosing, with expert picks across TV, streaming and film.
Ad