August 13th 2023.
At least 59 people were rescued in a joint effort by French and British coastguards on Saturday, but the tragedy of five who drowned after their boat deflated in the Channel near Calais left a sour taste in the air. Régis Holy, the captain of the Notre-Dame du Brisban lifeboat, said none of the victims were wearing life jackets and that the inflatable dinghy had been punctured.
"You don't get used to it," he told Liberation newspaper. "Handling a body is difficult, it is heavy, the clothes are wet." The six people who died in the latest tragedy in the Channel were all Afghan men thought to be in their 30s. They had been forced to leave without any emergency equipment, packed into an inflatable dinghy by smugglers who charged each person around £1,000 for the passage to English shores.
Hervé Berville, the French minister for the sea, spoke of a strategy of 'saturating' the coast with people who want to get to Britain, as search for survivors continued. "There were a lot of people on the water last night, with a fairly rough sea," he said. He described the smugglers as ‘criminals, who send young people, women, adults to their death, through these dangerous maritime routes.’
The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, described the incident as a ‘tragic loss of life’ and chaired a meeting with Border Force officials later on Saturday. Her words echoed those of the Refugee Council, who warned that ‘more people will die’ unless there are more safe routes to the UK. This latest disaster occurred almost two years to the day since the worst English Channel small boats incident ever, which saw 29 people in an inflatable dinghy collapse and 27 people die.
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