From the 1978 edition of
Airfields of the Eighth:
Kimbolton hit the headlines in November 1971 when an abortive attempt was made by a Syrian pilot, Rafiq Kalos El Jassen Ashour, to land four Indians and one Pakistani from a Piper Cherokee. On 28 November 1971, the local farmer, Mr. Raymond Convine, saw the aircraft standing on the airstrip. When he got close, he could see the pilot was masked whereupon he rammed the plane with his pick-up truck. When Ashour tried to escape, Mr. Convine went after him armed with a spanner, the masked pilot stopping several times during the chase to offer the farmer a £1000 bribe to forget the incident! When Ashour escaped with two men who had been waiting for the aircraft, Mr. Convine returned to the five illegal immigrants who were taken into custody.
A Terence Black was subsequently brought to trial in March 1973 and found guilty. At the time of the trial he was already serving an 18 month prison sentence in Glasgow, to which the Northampton Crown Court added three years for conspiring with others to evade the control of Commonwealth immigrants and two years for making arrangements to facilitate the entry of illegal immigrants into the UK. His brother Raymond, believed by the police to be the ringleader, had previously died in Paris in August 1972. Ashour escaped and was not brought to trial.
The incident sparked off an intensive check of all the disused wartime airfields in the East Anglia area and farmers and airfield owners were warned to be on the look out for aircraft landing in suspicious circumstances. Measures to combat the landing of illegal immigrants by plane still continue today (1978) and we were stopped by police during our visit to Framlingham airfield. The Directorate of Military Survey has also restricted the loan of wartime airfield maps...
One wonders whether such vigilance remains in place today...
