Winnipeg man accused of helping smuggle 8 foreign nationals into Manitoba

A Winnipeg man has been arrested after police allege he was involved in smuggling eight foreign nationals into Canada.

The group was discovered after an RCMP traffic stop of avehicle on McGillivray Boulevard, in south Winnipeg, around 2 a.m. Thursday, Mounties said in a news release Friday.

Inside the vehicle, police said they found the driver, 30-year-old Abdi Hassan Ali, along with a group of people from two countries in north Africa.

The passengers werea 33-year-old woman and seven men, ages 25 to 36, police said. Seven of them were from Chad, while the other was from Mali.

Mounties said Ali was charged under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and remanded into custody. He appeared in court in Winnipeg on Friday.

The group of people in the vehicle were arrested under the Customs Act and taken to an immigration support centre in Winnipeg, where RCMP said they were released from custody.

The investigation into the incident continues.

A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection saidagents on their side of the international border discovered sets of footprints in the snow near the border the same morning the group was apprehended in Winnipeg.

Those prints were discovered around 7:15 a.m. and appeared to have been made by a group of six to eight people, David Marcus said.

"They followed it out and it went into Canada," he said. "Given the time frame that the RCMP arrested the group and the time frame that our agents encountered the footprints, it's possible that it's the same group."

Manitoba RCMP Sgt. Paul Manaigre said Friday he couldn't provide any information on where the foreign nationals would have entered into the province or how long they'd been in Canada.

The update comes weeks after Manitoba RCMP said they had arrested a Calgary man accused of helping smuggle seven foreign nationals from Chad into Canada.

That group was pulled over near Dominion City, in southern Manitoba, after Mounties said they got a tip from the United States Border Patrol about a group of people walking north along a rail line toward the Canadian border near Emerson around 3:45 a.m. on Jan. 27.

In December, another group of men from Chad were found in Emersonafter RCMP said they illegally crossed the border into Manitoba. One was sent to hospital with serious weather-related injuries.

In January 2022, a family of four from India a man, a woman and their two children died while trying to cross the border into the U.S. near Emerson.