1. Takeaway fined £10,000 for illegal workers

A takeaway owner has been fined £10,000 for employing illegal immigrants at her business in Chorley. Mrs Depa Khan, of Diya Balti House and Takeaway, Chorley Old Road, Whittle-le-Woods, was fined for employing two workers who did not have permission to work in the UK.

A Bangladeshi man, aged 23, was arrested on suspicion of overstaying his visa and working illegally. Officers also arrested a 44-year-old man on suspicion of overstaying his visa and entering Britain illegally - both have been removed from the country.

2. Three held after hotel immigration raid

Officers wearing stab-proof vests have swooped on a north Northumberland hotel, arresting three Asian men suspected of working there illegally. The team from the UK Border Agency's Tyneside office, accompanied by police, targeted The Schooner Hotel on Northumberland Street in Alnmouth at about 7am on Monday, after an intelligence tip-off.

Three Bangladeshi men were arrested and are currently being detained at police stations in the area awaiting interviews.

3. Hounslow: Trio jailed for cannabis factory killing

Two Vietnamese men have been found guilty of killing an illegal immigrant who was brutally tortured in a Bedfont cannabis factory. Thanh Van Le, 31, and Cong Van Le, 48, both of Canterbury Road, were convicted by a jury of the manslaughter of 44-year-old Tran Nguyen following a four-month trial.

Father-of-two Mr Nguyen was repeatedly punched, elbowed, kicked, and thrown into a radiator by a group of thugs in a gang revenge attack at a property in New Road, Bedfont.

Quynh Van Huynh, 51, of Lambeth, south London, was also found guilty of manslaughter at Cardiff Crown Court. All three men were cleared of murder.

The four month trial revealed shocking details of Vietnamese drugs culture and underworld violence. Nguyen was severely beaten in November 2006 after being suspected by his drugs boss of stealing £40,000 worth of plants from a skunk factory he tended in Newport, South Wales.

Nguyen had arrived in Dover from Germany in the back of a lorry just two months earlier before finding work at the cannabis factory in Wales.

4. Immigrant jailed for passport scam

An illegal immigrant was jailed for 15 months after he was caught using a female passport to cash his salary cheque. Michael Ogunro, 26, of Maida Road, Belvedere, faces deportation to South Africa after he finishes his jail sentence, which was passed down at Woolwich Crown Court.

Ogunro pleaded guilty to a single charge of possession of a false identity document, with intent. He managed to get through UK customs using the fake South African travel document last year.

He then got hold of a false National Insurance (NI) card and found work as a cleaner. It was only when he tried to cash in a cheque at The Money Shop, Greens End, Woolwich, on July 3 this year that he was found out by an alert member of staff.

Prosecutor Gary Pons told Woolwich Crown Court: “He was asked if he had any identification and he presented the cashier with a passport.

“She was able to see that it was a female version of a South African passport but with his photo inserted.”

Ogunro told officers that he had bought the passport for £260 in South Africa after being approached by a ‘fixer' outside the Passport Office.

He claimed he came to the UK and got the NI card after asking a man on a train for help.

5. Raid netted six illegal immigrants

A fake passport sent to the Home Office to be verified was posted back to an illegal immigrant without the forgery ever being spotted, a court heard.

Six illegal workers from Moldova were arrested by immigration police after a raid in Daventry and now face deportation once they are released from prison.

Jiri Kopecky, aged 26, Lilian Yastij, aged 30, Vasile Vicol, aged 28, Ion Istrate, aged 25, Tatania Popa, aged 20, all of Beatty Close, and Denis Malinovski, aged 24, of Ethel Street, Abington, pleaded guilty to possessing forged identity documents and were each jailed for a year.

6. Appeal to find key suspect in immigrant tests scam

Police have released a picture of a key suspect in a major fraud inquiry into a “cash for citizenship” scam based at a training centre in Yorkshire.

Fraud squad detectives want to trace Mehmet Ince, a 35-year-old Turkish man with links to London, as part of the inquiry into a nationwide scam focusing on the City Wide Learning Centre in Sheffield.

A sixth person has been arrested in connection with the fraud which involved hundreds of immigrants from all over the country paying up to £700 each to ensure they passed the computer-based citizenship test called Life in the UK.

Four people were arrested when the centre in Broomhall was raided in February last year. Three of them were Sheffield-based directors of City Wide.

A 36-year-old Albanian man was arrested in Dagenham earlier this year for conspiracy to launder money and it has now emerged a 33-year-old Turkish man has been arrested in Sheffield on suspicion of the same offence.

Both are suspected of helping arrange for immigrants to take the test at the City Wide centre for a substantial fee. The official cost of the 45-minute test is £34.

People travelled from as far away as Glasgow and Portsmouth to take the test in Sheffield where the pass rate was just under 90 per cent for the first-time entrants compared to a national average of 66 per cent.