“I shouted my friend’s name five, six times, he didn’t answer.” Forty-eight hours after a shipwreck in the English Channel that cost the lives of eight migrants, Khames still does not know whether his childhood friend, lost from sight in the middle of the night, is among the victims.
On Monday afternoon, Khames, a 31-year-old Egyptian, came to Calais to attend a ceremony in memory of the eight people who died in this tragedy, which took place in Ambleteuse (Pas-de-Calais) on the night of Saturday to Sunday.
Among these eight victims is perhaps the friend that Khames met up with a month ago in Italy, from where they took a bus to France with the dream of reaching England. A friend who comes “from the same city, the same neighborhood, the same street” than him, he emphasizes.
“Just before we got on the boat, just a minute before, (…) he was on the beach. That’s the last time I saw him.”remembers this young man with carefully styled short hair, who does not wish to give his name so as not to alert his friend’s family before being certain.
It is almost midnight. The weather conditions are looking good.
Khames quickly understood that the boat, a fragile semi-rigid, was too small. Fifty-nine people would board, according to the prefecture.
In one go, his voice blank and his gaze vague, he describes: “People started trampling each other, screaming. Water started entering the boat, we turned around.”
“Nightmare”
Gone since “the Slack sector”a coastal river whose mouth is located between Wimereux and Ambleteuse, the boat is “came to run aground” on a rocky point and “was clearly torn on the rocks”reconstructed the prefect Jacques Billant on Sunday.
The boat ran aground, “Everyone started looking for their friend, their son, their brother, their loved one”. In the dark night, “No one could communicate. I shouted my friend’s name five, six times, he didn’t answer”Khames recalls.
He does not see the bodies dragged onto the beach by survivors, which a Sudanese woman observes in the light of her phone. Having seen them together in a camp, she assures Khames that she recognized her friend among the dead.
Since then, the young man has lived “a nightmare”He would like to identify his friend’s body to be certain but is not allowed to do so due to the lack of family ties. “There’s no one else here.”he gets upset.
His last hope lies in the ten injured people taken into care by emergency services. “I hope he is among them,” he said, not really believing it.
Faced with this tragedy, Khames gave up on crossing the Channel. “It was my first attempt and my last.”
He plans to apply for asylum in France. If it is refused, he assures that he will accept being sent back to Italy, where he entered the European Union.
At least 46 people died trying to reach England by boat from France in 2024, the deadliest year on record in the Channel.
“We are lost for words, we are devastated by what is happening”says Feyrouz Lajili, coordinator of Doctors Without Borders in Calais.
For Adrien Delaby, general delegate of the Auberge des migrants, “the worst thing would be to forget them.”
calais the channel shipwreck
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