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.”
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