Five migrants died last night while attempting to cross from northern France to Britain. The French maritime authority reports this French media. Four people were found dead in the water early Sunday morning. At 9 a.m. a hiker found the fifth victim.
The victims were part of a group of migrants who were rescued off the coast of Wimereux, just south of Calais, on the night of Saturday to Sunday. There the group tried to climb aboard a boat with which they would cross to Great Britain. It is not known exactly what went wrong. A tugboat patrolling the coast came to the rescue and found “lifeless and unconscious people in the water,” the French authority told the local newspaper La Voix du Nord.
According to authorities, the migrants wanted to take advantage of the windless situation and therefore ventured into the icy water. A total of 72 people were brought to safety, twenty of whom suffered from severe hypothermia.
According to the British government, almost 30,000 people crossed from mainland Europe to Britain in small boats in 2023, a drop of more than a third from the previous year, writes The Guardian . This is offset by a 30 percent increase in the number of deaths among asylum seekers in northern France who waited for better weather conditions to attempt the crossing.
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