Six Afghans died when a migrant boat heading to Britain sank in the Channel on Saturday, French officials said, as a search continued to find those still missing.
“This shipwreck is a terrible human tragedy,” French Secretary of State for the Sea Herve Berville told reporters at the port of Calais, the hub for rescue operations.
He denounced “criminal traffickers” who send migrants “to their death” and pledged to fight their smuggling networks.
Photo: AFP
The deputy public prosecutor for the coastal city of Boulogne, Philippe Sabatier, said that all six fatalities were Afghan men believed to be in their 30s.
The rest of the passengers were “almost all Afghans with some Sudanese, mostly adults with some minors,” he added.
The French and British coast guard rescued 61 survivors, Berville said.
French coastal authority Premar said that up to two people could still be missing and that search efforts would continue until nightfall.
“My thoughts and prayers are with those affected by the tragic loss of life in the Channel today,” British Home Secretary Suella Braverman wrote on social media site X, formerly known as Twitter.
French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne posted that her “thoughts go out to the victims,” as she praised the efforts of the rescue teams.
“It’s pretty tough, they’re humans. You will never get used to bringing back dead bodies,” said Regis Holy, the captain of a boat that retrieved five of the victims.
“There will be even more tragedies ... they [migrants] risk everything, it will never stop,” he added.
A spokesperson for the Utopia56 humanitarian group blamed border “repression” for the tragedy, saying that the difficulty of securing legal passage only “increases the dangerousness of crossings and pushes people to take more and more risks to reach England.”
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants with tuberculosis (TB) that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day. The jumbo effort at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets — the same as those used to treat TB in humans — hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets. The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000kg elephants. However, it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they
RSS