Immigration Worker Caught Trying To Smuggle Deported Albanian Lover Back Into Narrowly Escapes Jail

A security worker at the UK’s main immigration centre tried to smuggle her deported lover back into the country in the boot of her car.

Custody officer Kelly Henderson, 39, started an affair with Fatos Demirneli during his detention at Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre in West London.

When the ‘good looking’ Albanian was deported, the besotted mother-of-one plotted to sneak him back into Britain from France.

In August last year she drove across the Channel and tried to smuggle Demirneli back into the UK hidden in the back of her Nissan Micra.

But immigration officials at the Channel Tunnel entrance at Coquelles searched the car and found the stowaway – as well as a quantity of amphetamines.

Police then raided Henderson’s home in West Drayton, Middlesex and found MDMA, prosecutor Jim Harvey told Canterbury Crown Court.

Henderson, who has been sacked from the GEO Group which ran the immigration removal centre at the time, admitted people smuggling and two drugs offences.

But despite her crimes she escaped jail when a judge said what she did was ‘silly but understandable’.

Speaking after she was handed a suspended sentence, Henderson said she ‘deeply regrets’ trying to smuggle her boyfriend into the UK but said she still loves him and hopes he will still get into the country legally to be with her.

She said: ‘I’m over the moon with the sentence, I am extremely lucky.

‘I’d prepared everything to go to prison, my bank accounts, direct debits, keys, and I’d sorted out my daughter Amy living with my mum.