The worst shipwreck in an already deadly year: at least twelve migrants, according to a provisional report, died on Tuesday when the boat in which they were trying to cross the Channel broke up.
The boat got into difficulty off the coast of France, near Cap Gris Nez, at the end of the morning with more than 60 people on board, the Manche maritime prefecture said.
A state-chartered vessel, the Minckwho had spotted her, came to her aid as soon as she broke apart, Lieutenant Étienne 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 shipwreck victims, 12 of whom were declared dead at sea, and several others hospitalized in a serious condition on land.
Besides the Minckfirefighter 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 the victims are taking them back to Boulogne-sur-Mer.
Numerous emergency vehicles and firefighters have been 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 that was “completely ineffective”. [….] which leads to incidents and dramas […] “repeatedly”. “For two and a half months there have been deaths in the Channel almost every week.”
The tragedies have been happening one after another since the beginning of the summer, when crossings of the Channel on makeshift boats became particularly numerous, on ever more heavily laden vessels.
Between July 12 and 19, six migrants died in three separate shipwrecks on overloaded boats: four on July 12, an Eritrean woman on July 17 and a man on July 19.
At the end of July, a 21-year-old woman was crushed to death 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.
Before Tuesday’s shipwreck, 25 people had lost their lives on these crossings since the start of 2024, far exceeding the 2023 death toll of 12.
Illegal crossings of the Channel to the United Kingdom have 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 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 “strengthen” the borders.
The UK was rocked this summer by violent far-right riots following the murder of three girls on July 29, amid partly-debunked online rumours that the suspect in the attack was a Muslim asylum seeker.
The British government last week promised to significantly increase the number of returns to their home countries of failed asylum seekers and people still in the UK illegally.