This is the worst shipwreck in the English Channel since the beginning of 2024. According to the latest provisional report, twelve people died, two are missing and several others were injured on Tuesday, September 3, in the sinking of a migrant boat near Boulogne-sur-Mer, announced the resigning Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin.
“All state services are mobilized to find the missing and take care of the victims,” he wrote to X, saying he would go there, “with elected officials and emergency services”He arrived in Boulogne-sur-Mer shortly before 6 p.m.
The Manche maritime prefecture said it had taken in 65 shipwreck victims, 12 of whom were declared dead at sea. Several others, in serious condition, were hospitalized. Earlier, it had announced that at least ten people had died during this attempt to cross the Channel, after their clandestine boat broke up off Cap Gris Nez, specifying that this was a total of ” provisional “. Ten people rescued by rescue services off the coast of Wimereux (Pas-de-Calais) are in “absolute emergency”the prefecture told Reuters.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers Channel crossings increasingly deadly for migrants, who drown or suffocate in overloaded boats
Add to your selections
A rescue operation is taking place
A ship chartered by the State, the Minckhad spotted the boat in difficulty – which had more than sixty people on board – and rushed to its aid as soon as it broke apart, explained Lieutenant Etienne Baggio to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Besides le Minckfire and navy helicopters, two fishing boats and military vessels are being mobilised for the operation, which is still ongoing. The search continues, while the boats that picked up victims are taking them back to Boulogne-sur-Mer.
Numerous SAMU and firefighter vehicles have been deployed to the city’s port, where an advanced medical post has been set up to treat victims, AFP journalists noted.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers In the Channel, aggressive police techniques to prevent migrant crossings
Add to your selections
British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper described the deaths of the migrants on Tuesday as “horrible and deeply tragic”. “The gangs behind this appalling and unscrupulous trafficking of human lives are cramming more and more people onto increasingly unseaworthy inflatable boats and sending them into the Channel even in very bad weather.”she said in a statement. Before adding: “ They are not interested in anything except the profits they make from it.”
Unprecedented number of crossings
With Tuesday’s shipwreck, at least 37 people have lost their lives in these crossings since January 2024, making it the deadliest year since the start of the phenomenon of makeshift boats on the Channel. In 2021, 30 migrants died in the Channel, including 27 in a single shipwreck in November.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers Migration: Channel crossings on the rise
Add to your selections
According to British authorities, illegal crossings of the Channel to the United Kingdom reached an unprecedented number in the first half of 2024, with 21,615 migrants arriving on their soil by this means since January. In total, nearly 136,000 people have crossed the Channel from France on these makeshift rafts since the United Kingdom began recording these arrivals in 2018. The phenomenon has developed in response to the increasing lockdown of the Channel Tunnel and the port of Calais to stem migrant intrusions.
The World Workshops
Online courses, evening classes, workshops: develop your skills
Discover
The tragedies have been particularly frequent since the beginning of the summer, when crossings on makeshift boats have been more numerous, and the boats have been increasingly overloaded. Between 12 and 19 July, six migrants died in three separate shipwrecks, the boats being overloaded: four on 12 July, an Eritrean woman on 17 July, then a man on 19 July. At the end of July, a 21-year-old woman died crushed under the weight of other passengers in an overloaded dinghy, and two other migrants died in a shipwreck on 11 August, off the coast of Calais.
Charlotte Kwantes, from the migrant aid association Utopia 56, denounced to AFP a policy of “police repression” on the French coast “completely ineffective (…)which leads to incidents and dramas (…) repeatedly »adding: “For two and a half months there have been deaths in the Channel almost every week.”
The chief executive of the British Refugee Council, Enver Solomon, called for “improving legal access for those seeking safety”arriving in particular from Afghanistan, Syria and Sudan. “The strengthening of security measures on the French coast has led to increasingly perilous crossings, from more dangerous starting points, in increasingly fragile and overloaded boats.”he lamented.
Having come to power at the beginning of July, the new British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, announced that he wanted to speed up the processing of asylum seekers’ files while toughening up the fight against people smugglers, in order to ” to strenghten “ the borders.
