AFP
At least 12 migrants die in worst shipwreck of the year in the English Channel
The worst shipwreck in an already deadly year: at least twelve migrants, according to a still provisional report, died on Tuesday when the boat in which they were trying to cross the Channel broke apart. The boat got into difficulty off Cap Gris Nez late in the morning with more than 60 people on board, the Manche maritime prefecture said. A state-chartered ship, the Minck, which had spotted it, came to its aid as soon as it broke apart, Lieutenant Etienne Baggio told AFP. According to the resigning Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin, the toll reached 12 dead, two missing and “several injured”. The minister specified on X that he was going to the scene. The maritime prefecture of the Channel indicated that it had taken care of 65 shipwrecked people, 12 of whom were declared dead at sea, and several others hospitalized in a serious condition on land. In addition to the Minck, helicopters from the fire brigade and the Navy, two fishing boats and military vessels are mobilized for the operation, which is still ongoing. The search continues while the boats that took care of victims are bringing them back to Boulogne-sur-Mer. Many ambulances and firefighters are deployed to the port of Boulogne-sur-Mer, where an advanced medical post has been set up to treat victims, noted AFP journalists, who saw several body bags. – Record crossings – 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 tragedies (…) repeatedly”. “For two and a half months, there have been deaths in the Channel almost every week”. The tragedies have followed one another since the beginning of the summer, when crossings of the Channel on makeshift boats became particularly numerous, on increasingly crowded boats. Between July 12 and 19, six migrants died in three separate shipwrecks on overloaded boats: four on July 12, an Eritrean woman on the 17th and a man on the 19th. 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 August 11, off the coast of Calais. Before Tuesday’s shipwreck, 25 people had lost their lives in these crossings since the start of 2024, far exceeding the 2023 death toll of 12. Illegal crossings of the Channel to the United Kingdom reached a record number in the first six months of 2024, according to British authorities, who on Tuesday counted the arrival by this means of 21,615 migrants since January. Having come to power in early July, the new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that he wanted to speed up the processing of asylum seekers’ files while toughening the fight against people smugglers to “strengthen” the borders. The United Kingdom was rocked this summer by violent far-right riots after the murder of three young girls on July 29, against a backdrop of partly denied online rumors describing the suspect in the attack as a Muslim asylum seeker. The British government promised last week to significantly increase the return to their country of origin of rejected asylum seekers and people remaining illegally in the United Kingdom. cor-sm-cnp-bj/sp
