widthShortly after 3pm on Wednesday, when the lifeboat reached the dinghy, it was a crumpled pile of gray rubber, barely inflated, and almost floating on the water. And in the cold, dark water of the strait, surrounded by dead bodies.
When Charles Devos was at the helm of a rescue boat run by volunteers, two helicopters hovered noisily above their heads and noticed shapes floating in the water. “I just saw it there and almost completely deflated,” he said.
“We took out six floats. I have a woman, a pregnant woman. A young child, maybe 18 years old. Of the people I rescued from the water, not all of them are wearing life jackets. Under that temperature of water. , Hypothermia will happen very quickly.”
So far this year, 31,500 refugees and immigrants have embarked on small boats on French beaches in fear, opening a route for Britain 30 miles away, crossing one of the busiest waterways in the world, like many of them , The 27 people who died on Wednesday may have left less than an hour’s notice.
In the past three months, the number of cross-border attempts has more than doubled. Regardless of the cold autumn and the current water temperature of 12-13 degrees Celsius, the organization of their criminal network has issued fewer and fewer warnings to their customers.
Partly to take advantage of the calmness of the weather and partly to avoid police patrols, these gangs waited until the last minute to collect people from muddy, unsanitary makeshift camps-some tattered tents, some abandoned shopping carts, gloomy men. ——Sometimes hiding behind the sand dunes a few minutes before boarding.
Depending on the type of network and the type of transactions they make, passengers will pay 1,000 to 2,000 euros for a single trip. If they are rescued at sea or the ship has to turn back, no refund will be given, or multiple attempts up to 10,000 euros and success guaranteed .
Their smugglers are increasingly likely to be part of a highly specialized network. French police said that one such gang, which was disbanded this week, transported up to 250 people across the strait each month, charging up to 6,000 euros per person for multi-trip packages, and earning more than 3 million euros.
After a year-long investigation, 15 men including Iraqis, Romanians, Pakistanis and Vietnamese were arrested and 40,000 euros in cash were seized.They deliberately ordered inflatable toys that can accommodate up to 60 people in China. Regardless of safety, they imported Europe Through Turkey and collected from an address in Germany.
Xavier Delrieu, the officer in charge of the investigation, said: “This is a network of diehard criminals, which eventually reached an industrial scale.” Delrieu told local media that the gang got “drivers, bankers, people who alerted them to police signals. ——The help of the entire network.
The crossing was mainly carried out as night fell. A fleet of four inflatable boats traveled together. Most of the passengers were from the numerous small camps scattered around Grande Sinte, about 4 miles west of Dunkirk. One of the pick-ups. In a larger camp in the same area, close to the Auchan hypermarket, there were about 1,000 people. Last week, the coastline between Dunkirk and Calais was demolished by the order of the French Interior Minister Gerald Daminen. It tripled within the month, reaching 2,000.
A Calais official, who asked not to be named, said: “There were a lot of successful border crossings this summer, which attracted more people to come here.” “It’s hard to stop them. The police are stopping more now, but there are too many people.” Many, the coast is too long, and the traffickers have become very professional.”
The fatal crossing on Wednesday was a cold and wind-blown sweep from Loon-Plage west of the Grand Synthesizer, as described by an international organization migrant As the Strait’s largest single loss of life since it began recording in 2014-it is believed to have left.
Carrying at least 30 people — 19 men, two of whom survived, 7 women and 3 teenagers, most of them from Iraqi Kurdistan — this fragile inflatable boat must have set off early in the afternoon, rescuers Said that the wind was very small and the sea was relatively calm. It is unlikely that anyone will know exactly what happened next.
According to Bernard Barron, the head of the voluntary lifeboat service in the Calais region, there are several possible scenarios. “The strait is basically a sea highway,” Barron said. “More than 300 ships pass through it every day. Some of them are very, very large. Giant container ships, super tankers.”
The smuggler’s vessel did not carry radar, beacons, lights or safety equipment. Against the gray sky, they are almost invisible. “When a small inflatable boat like this passes through the wake of a giant container ship, the waves can be as high as 2 meters,” Barron said.
“You can imagine how the people on the boat feel in such low water. Tsunami. So this is a hypothesis. Direct collision is possible. A fatal structural defect is possible because these boats are very light and are Specially made for smugglers at low cost.”
At 2:50 in the afternoon, the Maritime Surveillance and Rescue Center in Cape Gris-Nez, 15 miles west of Calais, received the first alert from the captain of a fishing boat whose body was found in the water. The search and rescue helicopter was urgently activated and all local lifeboat services were alerted.
“As required, the Calais entered the water within 15 minutes,” Barron said. “All the lifeboats along the coast-Berck, Boulogne, Calais, Graflin, Dunkirk-are on standby; we look forward to the crossing attempt. Unfortunately for us, we are the first on the scene. A group of staff. The first to take out the body.”
Barron said that he and his colleagues in the coastal area “are now at sea almost every day. Earlier yesterday, two inflatable toys sank from Le Touquet. The sea was unusually calm in late November. Smugglers told their clients this It’s just a lake. But it’s not. It’s really not.”
On Wednesday night, when the bodies were carried ashore and the two survivors were taken to the hospital, many volunteers from the Immigration Aid Association lit candles in the port and held up placards asking “how many more people?”
According to the local maritime department, before Wednesday’s tragedy, 14 people drowned this year while trying to travel to the UK. In 2020, 7 people died and 2 people were missing; in 2019, four people died.
On Thursday, Interior Minister Darmanin announced that the fifth suspected human smuggler had been arrested due to the tragedy. He said that he had been driving a car with a German license plate and “bought a ship in Germany.”
Pierre Roques of the non-governmental organization L’Auberge des Migrants said that the strait could become as deadly as the Mediterranean. “People are dying here,” he said. “It is turning into a cemetery. And because England is across from it, people will continue to cross.”
