Raid on Conran restaurant found illegal workers

Six illegal immigrants have been deported following an immigration raid on Sir Terence Conran's Bluebird restaurant in London's King's Road.

The raid, by a large number of immigration officers backed up by police, took place on 28 May.

Fifteen people were arrested: six Algerians, two Mexicans, one Peruvian, one Bolivian, one Yugoslav, one Brazilian, two Poles and one Equadorian.

Six of these were then removed from the country and three more are due to be deported. No further action was taken against two of the arrested workers and the other cases are still outstanding.

A Home Office spokesman said the restaurant had co-operated fully with the Immigration Service and no action was being taken against it.

A spokeswoman for Conran stressed that the immigration officers had been looking into the personal documentation of some of Bluebird's foreign national employees and that the investigation did not relate to the manner in which the restaurant had processed their employment.

"We followed all the requisite procedures," she said. "We are not qualified to judge, for example, whether a passport is forged."

And she added: "We had no issue with those individuals. They were perfectly nice and good workers and we weren't aware that their documentation was falsified."