A French court on Monday sentenced an imam from northern France to two years in prison for helping migrants try to cross the English Channel in inflatable boats.
The 39-year-old preacher, who is of Iranian origin and was granted political asylum in France, is accused of organizing several crossings from northern France to the UK since December last year.
A 29-year-old Senegalese man who attended the mosque in Rouen where the imam preaches also stood trial.
He was sentenced to nine months in jail, and was banned from visiting the northern French regions of Nord and Pas-de-Calais for three years.
The imam fainted upon hearing his sentence.
The men admitted providing six or seven dinghies after they were taken into custody in April, the French newspaper Le Figaroreported on Monday.
The investigation began in late March, when gendarmes found life jackets, wet pullovers and a rubber dinghy on a beach in northern France.
Neither of the men was previously known to police, Le Figaro said.
Police found two boats, three outboard engines and life jackets in the imam’s house.
The two men confessed to buying seven boats between December last year and April.
The priest told the court that he went to a shop in Deulemont, on the border with Belgium, to buy boats for a person he identified only as Kamal.
Both defendants said they only found out later that the boats were being used by migrants for illegal Channel crossings.
“When I learned that, I thought of the children on board and I told myself there could have been deaths,” the Senegalese man told the court.
The imam for his part said that he was “ashamed.”
Prosecutors said their explanations “did not reflect reality” and that the imam was regularly in the areas where the boats were found.
For years, thousands of migrants from Africa, the Middle East and Asia have attempted to reach the UK from the French port of Calais, the vast majority by trying to stow away on trucks crossing the Channel.
However, there has been a rise in the number of migrants attempting to cross in boats, despite the risk of strong currents, cold waters and collisions in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
In March, a French court jailed two Iraqis and an Iranian man for organizing illegal migrant boat journeys across the Channel.
British Minister of State for Immigration Caroline Nokes called a spike in incidents in December last year “deeply concerning,” after dozens of people were rescued after sailing from France in an inflatable boat.
French Ministry of the Interior figures show that 276 people reached British shores last year.
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