France: Child trampled on overcrowded boat crossing Channel

France's interior minister said that several people, including a small child, died on Saturday trying to cross the English Channel in overcrowded boats.

"Today several people died trying to cross the English Channel," Bruno Retailleau said. "A child was trampled to death in a small boat." 

Retailleau said the "tragedy" again highlighted the need to crack down on people smuggling groups organizing the dangerous crossings. 

"The people smugglers have the blood of these people on their hands and our government will intensify the fight against these mafias who are getting rich by organizing these crossings of death," he wrote. 

Two overcrowded boats suffered engine failure and needed assistance off the French coast on Saturday, amid an uptick in crossings in recent days during a spell of more mild weather.

What else do we know? 

The Pas-de-Calais prefecture in northern France said another person was injured and airlifted to a nearby hospital in Boulogne after a small dinghy issued a call for assistance on Saturday morning. 

French officials said the accident was not a shipwreck and that the child had been found in the boat, not on the water. The mayor of the coastal town Le Portel, Olivier Barbarin, said the child was around 4 years old.

A French tow vessel, the Abeille Normandie (pictured at the top of this article) picked up 14 people on board the dinghy, including the deceased, between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. local time on Saturday.

Those rescued disembarked at Le Portel's port, Barbarin said.

The other passengers on board continued their journey.

French authorities seek to stop people taking to the water in the first place and respond to distress calls but do not impede the boats' journeys at sea, citing safety concerns.

Another overcrowded boat suffered engine failure off the coast of Calais, leading to a panic on board. Three people, two men and a woman aged around 30, were found at the bottom of the boat. The head of the Pas-de-Calais prefecture, Jacques Billant, said they were "probably crushed, suffocated and drowned" in the water on the floor of the boat.

Multiple crossings on Friday, as G7 launched new action plan

Thousands of people attempt unauthorized crossings of the English Channel each year, in one of the world's busiest commercial shipping lanes, with cold waters almost all year round and strong currents.

Early autumn and late summer are among the relatively less perilous times to attempt the crossing, when the water temperatures are near their annual highs (but still unsafe for swimmers without cold water experience) and before the rougher winter weather.

This was evident on Friday, as the UK Home Office said that a total of 395 migrants arrived in seven such boats. 

The Home Office said 25,639 people were known to have made such a crossing this year — similar to the figures for the same period last year and several thousand fewer than in 2022.

This coincided with the UK and the rest of the G7 agreeing on an anti-smuggling action plan designed to boost cooperation on the issue following talks in Italy. 

The UK said this would include intelligence-sharing and joint investigations to try to target smuggling gangs, as well as "working collaboratively" with social media companies to monitor online communications platforms being used to enable people smuggling.

It includes a call to such companies "to do more to respond to online content that advertises migrant smuggling services." 

"We all want to end dangerous small boat crossings, which threaten lives and undermine our border security," a Home Office spokesman said. He said the smugglers "do not care if the vulnerable people they exploit live or die, as long as they pay." 

The issue featured prominently in Britain's general election earlier this year and was particularly frequently raised by populist right-winger Nigel Farage and his latest political party, which calls itself Reform UK.

New French Prime Minister Michel Barnier also pledged a harder line on people smugglers in his inaugural address to the National Assembly earlier this week. 

Barnier said his government would be "ruthless" with people traffickers, saying that they "exploit misery and despair" that pushes undocumented migrants to risk crossing the Channel or the Mediterranean for profit.

msh/sms (AFP, dpa)