Police launched an international manhunt yesterday to find the trafficking gang who abandoned more than 900 Iraqi Kurds in a leaking cargo ship marooned on rocks off the French Riviera.
As French police and Interpol tried to track down the owner and skipper of the East Sea, both thought to be Iraqi, and its Turkish crew, the migrants underwent medical checks in a temporary holding center ahead of the complicated process of requesting asylum.
Daniel Chaz, the assistant director of France's border police, told reporters outside the center in the southern town of Frejus that the migrants were the victims of a joint operation by Turkish and Iraqi "mafia" gangs.
The Kurds, including more than 300 children under 10, were smuggled out of northern Iraq and kept in safe houses before being loaded onto the East Sea from a Turkish beach on Feb. 10 and spending a week trapped in "disgusting conditions" below-decks, surviving on water and biscuits, Chaz said.
On Saturday the crew, who wore masks and were careful not to be identified, ran the ship onto rocks just off the beach at the French Riviera resort of Boulouris, 40km west of Cannes, Chaz said.
The crew abandoned ship and fled, he said. Police sources said that a lifeboat found nearby had been damaged with an ax in a bid to conceal the escape, and that the boat left on the ship was also sabotaged.
French authorities rescued the migrants and have housed them in a "holding area" set up in a disused military depot while a large team of immigration and police officials prepared to begin interviewing them.
"They were astonished to arrive in France. They had been told they would be taken to Europe, but they didn't know where," he said, "They just wanted to come to a democratic country in Europe."
Police and immigration officials have been drafted from Paris and across the region to the town of Frejus, where the refugees are staying, to help interview the migrants, whom Chaz expected to demand political asylum.
"We have put in place, along with the public health authorities, a program of systematic medical checks with pediatricians and general practitioners in order to build up a complete picture of their state of health," Claude Oliver Martin, the Red Cross co-ordinator in Frejus, said.
Although most refugees were suffering from dehydration, only about 16 had needed hospital treatment, Martin said.
Regional officials said that border police would begin serving the Kurds notices that they had not been granted permission to enter France and that those who appealed for asylum would be granted court hearings from today.
But Thierry Claux of CIMADE, a French non-governmental refugee support agency which is permitted access to holding centers, warned the huge size of the latest cargo would create a headache for the authorities.
"They have only had access to four or five translators," he said, "And don't really know what's going on. ... When people are refused admission they are supposed, under law, to be returned to the country they came from by the method by which they arrived. These people's boat has sunk, and the crew escaped, so that can't happen," Claux said.
RSS