Albanian Gangs Traffic Children to U.K. Drug Market

Albanian gangs are luring children into their international drug and human trafficking ring. (Yew Media)

Albanian teenagers and young adults have fallen victim to an unlikely human trafficking coalition. The coalition is run between a cartel of drug-running street gangs looking to boost British markets and the children’s own parents, according to the Daily Telegraph. These gangs seduce the children’s families with promises of high profits and quick cash, the alleged rewards of participating in their international drug and human trafficking ring.

The Albanian gangs control significant shares in the British drug and cocaine markets, and the BBC reports that the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) is concerned by their "high-profile influence within U.K. organised crime.”

While the NCA warns of these groups’ increasing influence on the British cocaine supply, the Telegraph also stressed that Albania is the single largest international source of human trafficking into the U.K., with a 50 percent increase in cases reported since 2015.

NCA Deputy Director Michael Horne cautioned to the BBC that these gangs are “small in number but big in impact,” due less to their efficacy in the UK but more to their pervasiveness, and even popularity, in Albania. In promising poor Albanian families huge financial benefits in return for the use of their sons as drug dealers and traffickers in the British market, these gangs have developed rapport with local communities despite their exploitation of them.

“The majority of Albanian boys and young men are trafficked with the complicity of their parents and the promise of financial remuneration by the traffickers,” international law enforcement specialist Steve Harvey tells the Telegraph. “Families are approached by traffickers and engaged with on the basis of how they will profit financially from the deal.”

These gangs have ingrained themselves so deeply in poor Albanian communities that “in some cases family members were directly responsible for the recruitment and exploitation of male trafficking victims,” an anonymous source tells the British Home Office. In times of desperation and poverty, these teenage boys’ own parents trade their sons to the British cocaine market for the promise of eventual compensation.

These children, however, are thrust into the very indigence that their parents so desperately sought to avoid. Castaways in the cargo holds of internationally routed trucks, they endure the days-long journey just to end up on the streets of a foreign country or in the drug dens of these Albanian gangsters. Tasked with distributing thousands of pounds of cocaine to over one million Britons, these children are the manpower behind Europe’s largest drug market according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Rather than following through on promises of a better education and financial future for these children and their families, these gangs often leave those they exploit in prisons across the UK, the Telegraph reports. For example, Endrit Vishaj will now serve over four years in British prison for crimes he committed as a minor. The same Albanian gangs that trafficked him will simply seek out his peers to fill his place.