Paris: French authorities said four migrants, including a two-year-old boy, died on Saturday in two separate incidents while trying to cross the English Channel into Britain.
French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau deplored a “terrible tragedy” in X, stating that the boy “was trampled to death on a boat.”
“The smugglers have the blood of these people on their hands,” Retailleau added, stating that his new government must “intensify the fight against these mafias that make money from these deadly crossings.”
Saturday’s deaths come as a series of shipwrecks made 2024 the deadliest in recent years in the English Channel. Last month, 12 people died after a boat carrying migrants broke apart in the English Channel. About two weeks later, eight migrants died in a similar attempt to cross.
At a news conference, Pas-de-Calais prefect Jacques Billant said rescuers found the two-year-old boy dead aboard a migrant boat that had called for help on Saturday morning.
Fourteen other migrants picked up aboard the rescue ship were returned to France to be interviewed by border police and a 17-year-old boy was taken to a hospital in the port city of Boulogne-sur-Mer because he suffered burns to his legs, he said. Billant.
Other people on the migrant boat who refused to be rescued continued their journey toward Britain, he said.
“To make money and with no regard for human life, smuggling networks put people at increasing risk,” including families with children, “literally leading them to accident and death,” Billant said.
Boulogne-sur-Mer prosecutor Guirec Le Bras said the boy, who appears to have been crushed during a push on the boat, was born in Germany to a 24-year-old Somali mother.
In a separate incident, Billant, the prefect, said rescuers found three migrants dead and saved several more as they fell from a small boat overloaded with 83 passengers amid “panic and stampede.”
The dead “were probably crushed” and “suffocated … and drowned in the 40 centimeters (16 inches) of water at the bottom of the inflatable boat,” he said.
They were two men and a woman, all three in their 30s, he said.
The migrants rescuers treated on Saturday came from Eritrea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran, Ethiopia, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Kuwait and Iraq, Billant listed.
The prosecutor said investigations have been opened into both incidents.
Europe’s increasingly strict asylum rules, growing xenophobia and hostile treatment of migrants have been pushing them north.
Before Saturday’s events, French authorities said at least 46 migrants had died trying to cross into the United Kingdom this year.
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