Photo credit: BBC
Fourteen men have gone on trial in Paris over the deaths of at least 31 people in the worst mass drowning from a small-boat crossing in the Channel on record.
The Guardian reports that the accused men, alleged to be linked to people-smuggling networks, face charges including manslaughter and facilitating illegal immigration as part of an organized criminal group.
Twenty-seven people were confirmed dead when their inflatable dinghy sank in the early hours of 24 November 2021. Four people remain unaccounted for.
The victims were mostly Iraqi Kurds, but also included people who were Afghan, Ethiopian, Iranian, Somali, Vietnamese and Egyptian. The youngest known victim was a seven-year-old girl. The confirmed dead also included 15 men, seven women and two teenagers.
A team on a French fishing boat near British waters off Calais had raised the alarm when they saw several lifeless bodies floating in the river.
According to testimony from two survivors, the flimsy boat, which had attempted to cross one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes – between the northern French coast and Kent in southern England – began to deflate and take on water after several hours at sea.
Passengers fell overboard and drowned one after another, despite making about a dozen desperate calls for help to French and British rescue services. Only two men survived the tragedy.
Investigators allege that Afghan and Iraqi-Kurdish smuggling networks organized the migrants’ passage to Britain from camps near Grande-Synthe and Calais in northern France. The defendants face charges including involuntary manslaughter, facilitating illegal immigration as part of an organized gang and criminal conspiracy.
Two of them, including an Afghan man, are the subject of arrest warrants and will be tried in absentia.
The defendants have denied being smugglers and disputed their responsibility, or have presented themselves as people who were seeking to make the journey themselves.
But phone records and location tracking placed several of them near the departure site and linked them to organizing crossings to Britain.
For the people on the sinking boat, despite several distress calls, it was nearly 12 hours after the first pleas for help before the Russian fishing vessel finally found the dinghy.
