Mohammed is now in Calais, from where he hopes to get into Britain

He stands on the windswept sand dunes of Northern France, only 22 miles across the sea from Dover’s White Cliffs and the country he hopes to make his new home.

Mohammed Solebi risked his life to get to Calais, smuggled from the war-divided Middle East with nothing but his Syrian passport in a plastic bag. For seven days he lay in the wet hold of a rusting cargo ship, BlueSkyM, as it was steered in high storms towards Italy by a gang of migrant-traffickers.

The 38-year-old was one of 700 Syrians on the ship, which docked in the Puglian port of Gallipoli on New Year’s Eve after Italian maritime authorities boarded the boat to avert a catastrophic shipwreck.

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Mohammed Solebi (pictured) risked his life to get to Calais after being smuggled from the Middle East. He now hopes to start a new life in Britain

As soon as the migrants on board the stranded boat were brought ashore, many dispersed throughout Italy. Mohammed (pictured left and right) was one of those who headed for the open Italian-French border on the Riviera, crossing by train to the seaside resort of Menton, a few miles into France

The captain had cynically locked the BlueSkyM on autopilot, set a collision course for the rocky coastline two miles ahead and vanished from the wheelhouse, leaving the panic-stricken migrants to send an SOS message for help.

After their rescue, the 700 were taken by bus to holding camps across Italy, in line with EU rules which state that illegal migrants must stay in the first country they reach when they arrive in Europe.

However, the Mail has discovered that most left the camps within hours, with police and immigration officials turning a blind eye because they know that Italy simply cannot cope with the daily influx of migrants, and in the hope that they will disperse to other EU countries.

Mohammed was one of those who headed for the open Italian-French border on the Riviera, crossing by train to the seaside resort of Menton, a few miles into France.

There is no border control between Ventimiglia and Menton on either the motorway or the coast road; merely a sign saying ‘France’. The train line leads to Nice, the Cote d’Azur region’s main city, with travel links to Paris and Northern Europe.

A few days ago, Mohammed was the first BlueSkyM migrant to reach Calais, where 2,500 desperate people from Syria, Iran, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan wait in the hope that they can smuggle themselves on ferries to begin a new life in Britain.

Mohammed, who arrived at Calais on a dawn train from Paris, told me: ‘I know England is a good, strong country because it once had an empire. I want to go there and become an Englishman.’

Mohammed Solebi, pictured with his three-year-old daughter Aysha. Mohammed was on the BlueSkyM cargo boat which was stranded in the sea off the Italian coast

A few days ago, Mohammed was the first BlueSkyM migrant to reach Calais. Here he is pictured (right) with a friend

Appalling conditions: Hundreds of Syrian migrants - among them Mohammed Solebi - packed in the hold of the rusting cargo ship, the BlueSkyM

He said England also has ‘the best weather’, is safe because ‘there are CCTV cameras on every street’, and it has beautiful old ‘Tudor mansions’ to visit.

In Calais this week, a new centre opened, financed by the EU, offering three-course meals cooked by a top French chef for illegal migrants waiting to sneak into Britain.

The centre is more luxurious than the previous refuge, Sangatte, which shut down 12 years ago after UK protests that its very presence had turned Calais into a honeypot for illegal migrants hoping to come to this country.

The new centre, dubbed Sangatte 2, even has a bank of electric sockets so migrants can charge up their mobile phones to talk to their relatives already settled in the UK — many of whom have also smuggled themselves in via Calais.

It is thought that 30 migrants a week smuggle themselves successfully to the UK from the port, yet damning figures show that less than one a week is being sent back.

Mohammed’s journey represents a new way of getting to Europe. Until this winter, those fleeing the turbulent Arab spring countries, or poverty-stricken African states, paid for places on small boats organised by smugglers operating out of Libyan ports and sailing towards Italy, Malta or Greece during the summer months.

Now there has been a dramatic upping of the stakes: trafficking gangs are buying big ships, such as the BlueSkyM, for as much as £100,000 to transport migrants from the Turkish coast throughout the year.

Mohammed Solebi pictured on the train from Nice, southern France, on his way to Paris

Landfall in Europe: The migrants on BlueSkyM as they arrive in Italy

Fredrico Soda, an Italian-based official of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), says that smugglers are making ‘a lot of money’ which allows them to buy more ships to continue their trafficking. The large ‘mother’ ships wait offshore in international waters to receive the illegal passengers who are ferried out in powerful rubber dinghies.

It is a lucrative trade. Smugglers charged each migrant on the BlueSkyM up to £6,000 a head. There is never a shortage of takers and they make huge sums from each voyage.

‘The predictability of thousands fleeing Syria every month allows smugglers to plan for a reliable stream of customers and to set their own price,’ says Joel Millman, a spokesman for the IOM. In the first 11 months of 2014, Italian authorities rescued 163,368 people from trafficking vessels — about three times the total in 2013.

Syrians were the biggest contingent — nearly 40,000 of them by the end of November. The next highest number were Eritreans: 34,000 fleeing poverty and a despotic president for a new life in Europe.

Days after the BlueSkyM reached the Italian coast, a second ship (a one-time cattle freighter called The Ezzadeen) was towed ashore after its crew of traffickers fled in a lifeboat, leaving 359 Syrians, including 62 children, drifting off the southern Italian port of Corigliano.

The exodus seems endless, and European governments are finding it impossible to control the huge numbers. I went to the Italian-French border town of Ventimiglia and saw migrants from the BlueSkyM arriving on trains from immigration holding centres all over Italy.

Mohammed (far left) poses for a photograph with friends at a hotel in Mersin, Turkey, before he boarded the boat

Italian police, smoking and chatting to each other, watched but did not intervene as the migrants bought train tickets to Nice.

At the station, a local Algerian trafficker nicknamed ‘The Hat’ (because of his penchant for leather caps) did a brisk trade offering them an alternative route: lifts in his car, parked across the road, for £60 each.

Once the trains arrive in Menton, it is the job of French police to deal with the migrants and, as EU rules dictate, send them back by bus to Italy. Many, however, hid in locked lavatories or upstairs compartments of the double-decker carriages, which police have little time to search during the train’s short stop.

Mohammed crossed the Italian-French border on a train posing as a local businessman, after buying smart new clothes and a copy of that day’s Italian newspaper, which he pretended to be engrossed in. The police officers did not give him a glance they walked through the carriage where he was sitting.

At Nice’s main station, he and other Syrian migrants managed to elude the police again as they bought tickets for the high-speed train to Paris. Nearby, officers from France’s Police Nationale stood by and did nothing.

Having reached Paris, Mohammed caught the first train the following day to Calais.

In Calais this week, a new centre opened (pictured), financed by the EU, offering three-course meals cooked by a top French chef for illegal migrants waiting to sneak into Britain

I was able to monitor Mohammed’s journey because his name and mobile number were given to me by four fellow Syrians who had travelled with him on the BlueSkyM. They told me that he planned to go to England.

At Nice station, the four young men (a civil engineer, a doctor, a computer analyst and a university student, who all had a good command of English) gave me the first full accounts of the nightmare voyage.

Drawing maps, they said they had travelled from Syria to Turkey to be taken by traffickers to the BlueSkyM, which was moored about 50 miles off the coast.

Groups of migrants were then ferried in inflatable boats from the southern Turkey ports of Mersin, Tarsus, Adana and Ayas.

‘Waves broke over the inflatables, and some people fell into the water as they climbed onto the ship and had to be rescued by other migrants,’ said 23-year-old Mahmoud Hassan, who is from the city of Aleppo, the fiercest battleground of the Syrian conflict.

‘The traffickers had lied and lied to us. When they took our money, they told us that it would be a “five-star trip”.’

The civil engineer, whose father owned a refrigerator factory but is now retired, left Syria because he was ordered to join President Assad’s army to fight ISIS.

He explained that the BlueSkyM set off in calm waters, but the weather got stormy as it struck out towards Greece and Italy.

Tightly packed: Mahmoud Hassan (circled), pictured inside the BlueSkyM as it docks in the Italian port of Gallipoli

Migrants receive hot food from the association at Calais which can accommodate 1,500 migrants a day

‘The high waves sent water into the hold, where we were lying on a metal floor. ‘The children were crying and the women were scared. Even the bravest of men prayed to be saved.

‘The captain did not come down to us. He remained in cabins by the bridge. There were 700 of us, with just one toilet for the men, women and children. It was filthy. We were afraid we would catch infections.

‘For the last three days, there was drinking water only for the children.’

After their rescue by the Italian authorities, the boat’s Syrian captain was arrested, though he had tried to hide among the migrants because he wanted to begin a new life in Europe, too. It turned out he had been paid £8,000 by the traffickers to navigate the ship.

In Gallipoli, Mahmoud was taken from the quayside by officials and put on a bus to Potenza, where there is an immigration holding centre. Officials then began to fingerprint every migrant — as is required by EU laws, so that they can be traced.

Mahmoud says he was among a group of men who refused to have their prints taken, and the police ‘hit us and shouted that we had to respect their law. I was not allowed a lawyer.

‘The police banged my head on the desk and then forced my hands forward for the fingerprints.’

He says he ran away and caught the train to Ventimiglia. He intends to go to Holland, which is where his brother lives.

As for Mohammed, he was driven from Gallipoli to a migrant centre in Como, Northern Italy. But he, too, walked out and caught a train to Milan.

On his first attempt to cross from Italy to France, he was stopped at dawn by French border police on a Milan-Paris night train for not having a valid visa, and then escorted by police on a free ticket back to Milan.

Two chefs cook meals behind the scenes of the migrant care centre in Calais

There, he paid for a room in a hotel where he could rest, before setting off to the border again the next day. This time he went by train to Ventimiglia. From there, he had no trouble getting another train to Nice; and then to Paris and Calais.

Mohammed says he had a well-paid job at the Ministry of Islamic Affairs in Kuwait but gave it up after he was called up to serve in the Syrian Army.

He says he was threatened with fines — or even jail — if he did not return to Syria.

Scared, he flew to the Turkish capital, Istanbul, in early December, where he met up with people-traffickers who had put an advert on Facebook in Arabic saying that places were being sold for would-be migrants wanting to go to Europe.

Having struck a deal, he flew to Turkey’s south coast, where the gang put him in a hotel with a swimming pool near Mersin. They then took him by bus to join 300 other Syrians in an empty fish processing plant, where they waited three weeks for the ship to leave.

While there, he was instructed to go to a small office in Mersin to pay £3,200 for a place on the illegal voyage. Mohammed was given a receipt and a code number 12748, which the gang promised would entitle his family to a refund if the ship sank and he drowned.

Just before Christmas, they were told it was the night to sail.

‘They put us in a mini-van. There were 23 of us, all on top of each other. We were driven to a farm by a river and put on a rubber boat to go out to international waters where the ship was moored.’

He said he was terrified because the waves were dangerously big.

Here some of the migrants are pictured being directed to a tent to receive the hot food

‘The water came up to our thighs — we thought that was it. It was dark and we had no life-jackets. A doctor near me was crying. I think he’d lost his mind with fear.’

It was not the only time the migrants thought they were going to die. ‘Water poured into the ship when the storms started. Even those who never pray, prayed to live,’ Mohammed recalls.

His 25-year-old wife Rana and their two children, Aesha, three, and Omar, 19 months, remain in Kuwait in the family’s modern air-conditioned flat, waiting for him to reach England, where they hope to join him.

He had phoned them to say he has reached Calais, but spared them details of his harrowing seven days at sea. He is staying in a small hotel paid for with money sent via Western Union by his family.

After such an ordeal, it would be understandable if Mohammed never wanted to deal with a people-smuggling gang again — yet he is preparing to pay another trafficker in Calais for a place on a lorry travelling to England.

He says: ‘I have been told to find an Armenian here who gets migrants across the Channel with the help of truck-drivers who are part of his gang.’