Standing on a quiet street in Preston, this modest-looking, pebble dash terraced home appears nothing out of the ordinary.
Yet behind its doors, its jobless occupant was running a ‘sophisticated’ multi-million pound criminal enterprise organising Channel crossings for migrants into Britain.
But far from keeping a low profile, Amanj Hasan Zada was filmed throwing around piles of cash and firing a handgun to celebrate his work as the ‘best people smuggler’.
Using just a mobile phone and social media, from his living room the Iranian national, 35, was able to orchestrate the smuggling of hundreds of migrants into the UK on small boats.
He charged up to £8,500 per person for the deadly crossings from Iraq, Turkey and other parts of the Middle East into Europe.
Zada even offered discounts to those willing to film themselves making the crossings, so long as they gave him a positive ‘review’ of their journey on Facebook and TikTok.
Videos of migrants celebrating their crossing or sat on cramped yachts praising Zada as ‘King of the sea’, amassed thousands of views online and portrayed him as some sort of folk hero.
One video on YouTube thought to have been recorded in Iraq in 2021, showed him at a party with musicians singing a song in Kurdish feting him as ‘the best smuggler’.
‘All the other smugglers have learned from him’, the singer says, while he throws cash at them and fires a gun in the air in celebration.
But, it was his virality that ultimately lead to his downfall, with Zada eventually arrested and sentenced to 17 years for smuggling offences in 2024 following an extensive investigation by the National Crime Agency.
A new podcast into the case details how officers were able to track down Zada’s whereabouts and secure vital evidence needed to convict him as well as the race against time to arrest him and prevent anymore lives being put at risk.
The tiny terraced house in Preston, from which Zada managed his criminal enterprise using just a mobile phone and a vast social media network
Amanj Hasan Zada (pictured) was jailed for 17 years after a YouTube video showed him firing a gun while celebrating bringing seven illegal immigrants to Britain
The 35-year-old was found guilty of people smuggling charges, following an investigation by the National Crime Agency
In December 2023, NCA investigator Alistair Mullen was put in charge of the investigation which sought to better understand Zada’s criminal enterprise and secure as much evidence as possible.
‘First, we had to track him down. He was an illegal migrant himself. He entered the UK illegally and as such there is a footprint for him in the UK,’ Mr Mullen said.
‘So we were able to confirm his location, which we knew was Preston, but through a number of partners, they can tell us that he’s paying council tax at this address.
‘He was a top people smuggler, there wasn’t really much he couldn’t offer people. So I had to come up with a way we could gather the evidence.’
A surveillance team was then deployed to monitor Zada’s movements in the hopes he may give more away about his extensive crime network.
Recalling the operation, one of the specialist surveillance team said: ‘If I was saying it was hostile to law enforcement I would probably be underselling it.
‘It’s an area that is frequented by migrants, frequented by drug dealers. It’s the middle of the prostitution area within Preston.
‘So nighttime activity particularly was quite active. It never seemed to die off at all. So that in itself was a challenge because we obviously had to fit in.’
The officer continued: ‘You need people who have the wherewithal when confronted by third parties to be able to provide a cover story and satisfy the third party that they’re not law enforcement.
‘You know, if you’re sat in the van, you’ve got to convince them that you’re a builder.’
Officers began by following Zada and seeing which other contacts he was meeting. But this proved challenging as many of his associates were overseas managing the crossings themselves.
And when he did meet people, Zada would refuse to leave the house and instead made them come to him. Most of those would tend to be Asian men and the surveillance team struggled to differentiate when Zada was meeting with friends or criminal associates.
‘They think they’re being really clever by living in a small terraced house, driving around in a small Hyundai car,’ the surveillance officer said.
‘Not particularly extravagant in any way, shape, or form. On the face of it, they don’t look like they’re these big-time criminals with these lavish lifestyles and everything else.
‘But that doesn’t mean that they haven’t got two or three million pound stuck in a bank waiting for them to go and retire to. Doesn’t mean they haven’t got an estate back in Turkey waiting for them to go and retire to.’
Peppered across Zada’s Facebook and TikTok were enticing posts featuring pictures of yachts and a phone number to call if users wanted to make inquiries
Alastair admitted the team were forced to ‘think outside the box’ for ways to collect evidence and so decided to deploy listening devices at Zada’s home, which proved central to the investigation.
The team gathered a number of recordings which included conversations about yachts, immigration camps, and payments for passengers.
In one recording, Zada was heard referring to himself by his criminal alias, Aman Zaman, and described how one migrant had reached ‘the other side’.
Alastair explained: ‘It gave us a really clear picture of the network that he was operating, the volume that he was operating at, and the structure of how he was running this criminal enterprise.
‘He had people who had specialist capabilities for him, people who were responsible for recruiting the migrants, so essentially a sales team on the ground. He had people who were running the social media networks for him.
‘He had oversight of what was put out there, but they were all posted from the KRI.
‘So, it was quite a sophisticated network that he was running. It was a strong business model that he had.’
Zada sometimes created videos of him being thanked by those he had previously helped, which were used on social media to generate more customers, the NCA said.
Zada sometimes created videos such as these, of him being thanked by those he had previously helped
In one video, a group of people sitting on bunk beds can be heard using Zada’s criminal alias Amanj Zaman
One showed a group of men on a crammed boat to Italy praising him, while another showed a large group of men sitting on the ground after arriving in Macedonia in October 2023.
‘Thanks to God, today, the date is October 5, 2023, and with the help of Amanj Zaman we arrived to the country,’ the man behind the camera says.
Zada would offer people discounts for such videos, which he would oversee the production of and then share on social media, with a phone number to call if users wanted to make inquiries.
Intelligence officer Monica was tasked with scouring the internet to make a record of such videos, showing how they could be linked to Zada.
‘The majority of his content was videos of migrants currently crossing,’ she told the podcast.
‘They were usually from Turkey to Italy and it would be videos of the migrants celebrating their crossing either having got to the other side or on the yachts themselves praising Zada saying things like “he’s the lion of the sea” or “the king of the sea”.
‘For example, there was one where migrants were ripping up their passports after a successful crossing. That was the majority of the content. The social media material that we relied on was really important cause it set the tone.’
‘Every single account he had, he had multiple across the time we were investigating him, but all of them had upwards of a thousand followers. I think at the start we had one that had closer to 10,000.
‘They were all getting likes, shares, loads of comments just praising Hasan Zada. There were numbers quite often advertised for the migrants to contact him or his other facilitators on. That’s how he was getting migrants basically.’
One video shows a group of men on a crammed boat to Italy praising Zada
Another video showed a large group of men sitting on the ground after arriving in Macedonia in October 2023
But, the NCA agents couldn’t bring criminal charges with these posts, despite them being linked to Zada’s social media profiles. They had to also prove he was facilitating the crossings.
‘Advertising as it stands is not a criminal offence. To do that, you need to prove that they are committing that offence. And there’s a lot of work that has to go into doing that,’ Alastair explained.
‘Not to mention even the attribution of the pages. If somebody has a page in my name and post something, well, that’s not my responsibility. That is someone else doing that. So, it makes it difficult.’
The investigation ramped up in May 2024, when the NCA’s covert monitoring revealed Zada had organised a yacht to carry migrants from Turkey and sail across the Mediterranean.
Officers were forced to act fast and prepare for Zada’s arrest, believing that people’s lives were in danger if the crossing went ahead.
‘We couldn’t allow that to happen. So we needed to disrupt that as best we possibly could and arresting him was the only option that it came down to for me.
‘So in a risk-to-life situation like that, obviously our obligations under ECR take priority over absolutely everything that we do.’
Over the next 72 hours, the team dedicated all their efforts to finding the yacht, while also gathering together all the evidence they had found on Zada to ensure they could bring charges against him.
Zada was arrested in his terraced home in Preston during a dawn raid in May 2024
Zada is seen here being led away by NCA agents following his arrest
‘There was a lot of international work that went on cause if we could identify where that yacht was, then partners in Turkey would have been able to interdict that for us and safeguard those migrants.
‘The case team were going over some of the material that we had to try and find anything really that we could present to the CPS as an appropriate level of criminality.’
The team were able to link Zada to three migrant crossings into the UK, giving Alastair and his team the green light to pounce on the people smuggler once and for all.
Footage of the dramatic dawn raid shows officers storming Zada’s home, arresting him and escorting him into the back of a police van.
His phone was also seized, with analysis showing it was linked to a number of social media accounts used to post material, and phone numbers advertised on them.
Recalling the raid, Alastair said: ‘We had specialist capabilities on the day we had digital field officers accompany us at the arrest because the plan was if we can get into his phone, then we might be able to identify a location for this yacht.
‘It was within 12 hours that was going to set sail. So that was a priority for us, getting hold of that phone and then trying to get into it.’
The team were eventually able to get a rough location of where the migrants were being held and where the location of the yacht was.
Zada’s arrest also meant the rest of his gang called off the crossing, meaning the migrants were successfully safeguarded.
NCA agents also travelled to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, where they arrested another three members of the network in Sulaymaniyah in January 2025
Zada’s brother, Anjan Ahmadi, 26, has also been jailed for his role in the crime group by helping two migrants to illegally enter the country
NCA agents are seen arresting Ahmadi in July 2024 , just two months after his brother
During his trial, jurors heard that Zada had lived in the UK for over eight years and was ‘well-versed’ in the process of claiming asylum.
Prosecutors said he had developed ‘a lucrative business’ with references in phone calls and on social media to payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Messages exposed how the migrants were taken on torturous journeys through Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Belgium and France before making it to dinghies taking them across the English Channel.
Zada claimed there were ‘fake profiles’ of him on social media that had nothing to do with him. He alleged that multiple mentions of smuggling captured on his mobile phones and on secret recordings were references to moving alcohol between Iran and Iraq.
Zada was found guilty of three counts of facilitating illegal immigration in relation to seven people and was sentenced to 17 years in prison in November last year.
But the NCA investigation didn’t stop there, as officers continued to probe Zada’s associates both at home and abroad.
Supported by law enforcement in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, the team arrested another three members of the network in Sulaymaniyah in January 2025.
They included two other people smugglers and a Hawala banker who had processed financial transactions for the gang.
And just last month, Zada’s brother, Anjan Ahmadi, 26, was jailed for his role in the crime group by helping two migrants to illegally enter the country.
He was arrested in July 2024 , just two months after his brother. During his arrest investigators found a voice note conversation on his phone with an individual who wanted to travel to the UK with his relatives, but ‘not by dinghy’.
Ahmadi referred the man to another people smuggler who dealt with lorries, saying ‘go with my name’.
He eventually pleaded guilty to two counts of facilitating illegal immigration to both the UK and EU.
