At least eight people trying to reach England died in the night from Saturday to Sunday off the coast of Pas-de-Calais. The prefecture and associations deplore a particularly deadly year and increasingly difficult intervention conditions.
On the Pas-de-Calais coast, everyone knows it: when the day is beautiful, the night risks being deadly. Saturday, the inhabitants of Ambleteuse, a small seaside town located north of Boulogne-sur-Mer, were able to enjoy mild late summer weather. Cool but dry, often sunny. In some places, from the tourist resort, you can see the British coast. They seem very close, barely forty kilometers away, as the crow flies.
It was off the coast of this village that an overloaded clandestine boat was torn apart on the rocks, during the night from Saturday to Sunday, around 1 a.m. At least eight people, men “apparently major”, according to the Pas-de-Calais prefecture, died in the sinking of the makeshift boat on which around sixty passengers were crammed “from Eritrea, Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt and Iran”Six survivors were transported “in relative urgency to the hospitals of Boulogne and Calais, including a 10-month-old baby in a state of hypothermia”, indicated the prefect, Jacques Billant, during a press briefing organized on the Ambleteuse sea wall on Sunday morning.
“Humanitarian emergency zone”
Gone since “the Slack sector”, coastal river whose mouth is located between Wimereux and Ambleteuse, the boat broke up as soon as it arrived at sea. “Only one in six people were equipped with a vest,” stressed the State representative in the department, before recalling that more than 200 migrants had been rescued at sea the day before by the maritime prefecture of the Channel and the North Sea (Prémar). A “new drama” occurred less than two weeks after the worst shipwreck of the year in Hauts-de-France, which left twelve dead (ten women, two men), two missing and several people in dire need on September 3 off Cap Gris-Nez, between Boulogne-sur-Mer and Calais. The deadliest incident since the one that caused 27 deaths – and 4 missing – on November 24, 2021, near Calais. A trauma in the region, for residents as well as for associations who are worried about the growing indifference to a morbid repetition that has sadly become commonplace.
“A total of 46 migrants have died since the beginning of the year while trying to reach Great Britain on board a small boat.”observed the prefect of Pas-de-Calais on Sunday morning. The associations helping exiles on the coast report more than fifty deaths. In any case, 2024 is the year that will have recorded an unprecedented number of deaths since the increase in attempts to cross the Channel by boat in 2018, after the lockdown of the Channel Tunnel and the port of Calais.
“This year 2024 is very difficult. The conditions for intervention by law enforcement are made very complex with very aggressive smugglers and migrants, notes Jacques Billant. In recent days and again this night, police and gendarmerie vehicles have been targeted and police officers and gendarmes have been injured.» “The fight against the crossing networks and police action to prevent crossings is ineffective and leads to these tragedies, responds the Utopia 56 association in a press release. France and England must recognise the Channel as a humanitarian emergency zone and help the people there to stop being guilty of these deaths.”
Departures, “it’s all the time”
In recent days, thanks to a favorable weather window, crossing attempts have multiplied. On Saturday alone, “18 attempts at boat departures were monitored” by the Regional Operational Center for Surveillance and Rescue of Cap Gris-Nez, announced the maritime prefecture. After a particularly macabre summer, coastal residents, between resignation and compassion, know that they still risk hearing, at dawn, a ballet of helicopters searching for survivors at sea. The fall of 2023 was marked by several shipwrecks on the coast of Nord and Pas-de-Calais: three dead on November 22 in Equihen-Plage; two others drowned on December 15, the same day that Gérald Darmanin visited Calais to defend his bill on immigration.
Departures, “It’s all the time: winter, day, night, summer, as soon as the sea is calm”deplores the association volunteer Christine Leclair. In Ambleteuse, Sunday around 7:30 a.m., barely a handful of hours after the shipwreck in which eight exiles lost their lives, a second, similar boat was trying its luck towards England.
Update : at 9:20 a.m., with the police report; at 11:30 a.m., at 6:45 p.m. with more context.
