A get-tough judge has warned drivers who smuggle people into the UK they can now face severe jail sentences.

It followed a case where a Bulgarian lorry driver, bound for Stoke On Trent, stashed two Syrians in his cab.

Grigor Grigorov, 40, was stopped at Dover Eastern Docks earlier this month when the two illegal immigrants were detected by a special scanning device.

Now Judge James O’Mahony has told the lorry driver, who admitted two people smuggling charges, that the Syrians may have been “decent people trying to make a better life for themselves away from their war-torn country”.

But, he added: “This offence now is so serious that it calls for deterrent and severe sentences.”

Sitting at Canterbury Crown Court, he jailed the lorry driver for 32 months – which is two-and-a-half times higher than the usual sentence for people caught entering or leaving the UK with bogus IDs.

Grigorov claimed he had come from Italy and was heading to the Midlands but suspicious security officials searched the lorry.

They discovered two men from Syria hidden in a lower bunk behind the driver...they also found Euros 1900 under the driver’s foot.

The judge added: “The real seriousness of this offence is that you did not know – and neither did the Border Agency – that these men from a war-torn country meant no harm to this country.

“ It would not have been much fun for those men to be kept in the conditions they were and then being returned post haste from whence they came.

“I am afraid the time has come for the court to impose a deterrent sentence, if for nothing else, than to discourage others who may be tempted to do the same thing.”