This is the first death of a migrant in the Channel in 2022. Thirty people who were on the same boat on Friday were able to be rescued.
A young migrant died on Friday after trying to cross the Channel with around thirty other exiles who were rescued off Berck (Pas-de-Calais), announced the Boulogne-sur-Mer prosecutor’s office. The victim, aged about twenty, is a priori of Sudanese nationality, specifies the prosecution, which has opened an investigation against X for manslaughter.
According to the prosecution, at least 30 people who attempted the crossing on Friday with the young victim were able to be rescued “safe and sound”, but in a state of“hypothermia”. According to a source close to the investigation, the migrants were on “a semi-rigid canoe”. They may have been trapped by the tide, five of them having been “recovered from a sandbar by firefighters”, specifies the prefecture of the Channel and the North Sea.
“Resources remain committed in the area to provide assistance to people who find themselves in difficulty. Other assistance operations are still in progress. also indicates the prefecture, which adds that“a subsequent assessment will be made at the end of the day”.
This tragedy – the first recorded in the English Channel in 2022 – comes as crossings of the Channel in small boats reached a record number in 2021, at more than 28,000 people, according to the British press agency PA. The phenomenon, which has developed strongly since 2018 in the face of the closure of the port of Calais and the Eurotunnel, which migrants borrowed while hiding in vehicles, poisons relations between London and Paris.
At least 34 people died in these crossings last year, including at least 27 on November 24 in the worst tragedy to have occurred on this migratory route, arousing a wave of emotion as much as a renewed tension between London and Paris on the migration file.
Updated January 14, 2021: this article was updated in the morning with the press release from the Manche prefecture.