A 32-year-old man was arrested in the UK on Tuesday as part of the investigation into the deaths in November 2021 of 27 migrants who were shipwrecked while crossing the English Channel on a rubber boat, the British agency said. against crime (NCA).
Harem Ahmed Abwbaker has been arrested in the southwest of England and “is suspected of being a member of the organized crime group which conspired to transport the migrants to the UK on a small boat”, said the NCA in a statement.
On November 24, 2021, 27 migrants aged between seven and 46 – 16 Kurds from Iraq, one Kurd from Iran, four Afghans, three Ethiopians, one Somali, one Egyptian and one Vietnamese – died in the sinking of their inflatable boat. off Calais, as they attempted to reach Great Britain.
Only two passengers, an Iraqi Kurd and a Sudanese, had been rescued.
Mr. Abwbaker was found and arrested by the British authorities with the help of France, underlines the press release of the NCA. He “will remain in custody to appear in Westminster Magistrates Court tomorrow, where extradition proceedings will begin.”
On the French side, ten alleged members of the network of smugglers at the origin of the sinking were indicted this summer.
In a recent article in mid-November, the French newspaper Le Monde said that the passengers of the boat had called the French authorities about fifteen times to ask for help, in vain.
The question of migrant crossings in the English Channel has been the subject of tension between Paris and London, but the two countries signed an agreement in mid-November, with in particular an envelope of 72.2 million euros that the British will have to pay in 2022-2023 to France to increase from 800 to 900 the number of police and gendarmes on French beaches, from where migrants leave.
More than 40,000 migrants have arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats this year, a record.