On November 24, 2021 at dawn, 27 migrants died in the icy waters of the English Channel while trying to reach England. Until now, the maritime prefecture of the Channel (on which depend the French relief, the CROSS) claimed to have been aware of the sinking only on November 24 at 2 p.m., when a fishing boat spotted the lifeless bodies of the migrants.
But a French source told the Cellule investigation de Radio France that some of these migrants had indeed dialed 196, the CROSS number, that night, to ask for help. This source specifies that the exchanges took place in English, a language which the Iraqi Kurds present on the boat and the duty officer at the CROSS Gris-Nez mastered very well. Contacted following this information, Véronique Magnin, the spokesperson for the maritime prefect of the Channel, told us that this telephone contact was “highly likely”.
So why weren’t the migrants rescued? The maritime prefecture puts forward several hypotheses. Either the deployed rescuers failed to locate them, or they arrived in the area and rescued another sinking boat, without seeing the first boat. That night, there were a lot of departures, the CROSS saved a hundred migrants. The maritime prefecture, on the other hand, denies that the French relief services and the English services, also contacted by the exiles before the sinking, “passed the buck” as to who should intervene. “It would make no sense to save a hundred migrants and leave those from that boat at sea”continues Véronique Magnin.
A few hours after the sinking, the only two survivors, Mohammed Shekha Ahmad and Mohammed Isa Omar, had already affirmed, each on his side, in an interview with the Kurdish media Rudaw, that migrants from their boat had contacted the British rescuers who had told to call the French, and that the French would have given them the opposite answer. A source from the Cellule investigation de Radio France affirms that the two survivors made similar comments during their hearing by the French police. On the basis of these testimonies, the Utopia 56 association filed a complaint against the maritime prefect of the Channel, against the director of CROSS and against the head of the British coast guard for “involuntary homicide” and “failure to provide assistance”.
Did the emergency services really pass the buck? The CROSS communicated to the judges of the Junalco (national jurisdiction for the fight against organized crime) in charge of the investigation, 5,000 recordings corresponding to the night and the beginning of the day of November 24. The spectrum is wide since it concerns all the communications passed by and towards the CROSS Gris-Nez in the English Channel that day, whether by migrant boats, fishing boats or commercial vessels. Their analysis will be decisive in knowing what the reaction of the French rescue services was when they were contacted by these migrants in distress.
Was the boat then in British or French waters? According to an expert commissioned by the families of the victims in England, the last known position of the boat was one nautical mile inside British waters. This does not however exonerate the French party, because under the international convention on maritime search and rescue (signed by France and the United Kingdom), “parties are required to coordinate their search and rescue services with those of neighboring states“.