(Boulogne-sur-Mer) Four migrants drowned on Friday off the northern coast of France, during a crossing of the Channel that thousands of would-be exiles take each year at the risk of their lives to reach the United Kingdom.
Around sixty people had left the French coast near Boulogne-sur-Mer at around 2 a.m. (local time), but their inflatable boat ran into difficulty at dawn, the maritime prefecture said.
A bladder has deflated, the rescue ship found. Minckwho quickly came to their aid around 4:30 a.m., with the help of a fishing boat sailing nearby, according to the same source.
Some 56 passengers were saved, Pas-de-Calais prefect Jacques Billant told the press, some of whom were “adrift in the water, and others still clinging to the tube of their dislocated boat”, according to the maritime prefecture.
Four men died, whose nationality could be “Somali, Eritrean or Ethiopian”, according to Mr. Billant, and nine survivors, six men and three women, were hospitalized in relative emergency.
“Only one migrant was wearing a life jacket, and […] “Some others were equipped with inner tubes,” lamented the prefect, describing “very poor quality boats, because they were under-inflated, without a floor, and under-powered.”
Two Libyans, aged 34 and 17, were arrested and taken into custody on Friday evening, the Boulogne-sur-Mer prosecutor’s office told AFP in the evening.
The panic
“When we arrived, there was panic: it was still dark, we could hear screaming, the wind and the current were very strong,” says David Malfoy, skipper of the fishing boat. The Caprice of the Timeswho saved 14 migrants, mostly young men, Somalis according to them.
“We threw everything we could into the water, buoys, life jackets. We had to go very quickly because they didn’t have any,” he told AFP. “We pulled them up with our bare hands, and it was all the harder because some of them were hanging on to others.”
The tragedy brings to 20 the number of migrants who have died in similar circumstances since the beginning of the year, according to the prefect. Since January, the prefecture has recorded 344 attempted crossings, which is almost two every day. On Friday, a second boat was rescued, with 40 migrants on board.
The new British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper deplored the “horrific” tragedy on X, pledging to “accelerate our action with our international partners to pursue and bring down dangerous people-smuggling networks”.
An investigation was entrusted to the French Office for Combating Illicit Trafficking in Migrants (OLTIM) and the survivors who were not hospitalized were “taken in to be heard initially as witnesses,” according to the Boulogne-sur-Mer prosecutor’s office. This summer, more than 1,000 police officers and gendarmes are deployed on the coast to combat illegal immigration.
Among the busiest in the world, the Strait of Pas-de-Calais has been the scene of numerous shipwrecks in recent years, the worst having occurred in 2021 when 27 migrants, mostly Iraqi Kurds aged 7 to 46, drowned. This does not discourage migrants from embarking.
More than 12,000 people reached English shores illegally in 2024, mainly from France, according to official British figures in mid-June, an increase of 18% compared to the same period last year.
Irregular migrants are now banned from seeking asylum in the UK, and Labour, which scrapped a plan to deport them to Rwanda, has pledged to tighten control of the Channel.