18 July 2024 , 14:12
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French and British coastguards rescued a further 71 people who had tried to cross in an overcrowded dinghy on Wednesday
A person has died trying to cross the Channel to reach Britain in an overcrowded dinghy, French officials have said.
A further 71 people were rescued after the vessel deflated off Gravelines on France’s northern coast on Wednesday, the regional maritime police authority said in a statement.
French emergency services sent a plane, two helicopters and a rescue boat to search for people in the water.
A French ship took on board 59 people, including one who was unconscious and “could not be revived”, the statement said. It added that a British coastguard boat took on a further 13 people.
All those rescued were put ashore at Calais and received by the emergency services.
Aircraft and vessels searched until dark and found no other people, the statement said.
It is the fifth such death since Keir Starmer took office as UK prime minister. A rescue operation took place off Boulogne-sur-Mer on France’s northern coast on Friday after reports of people in the sea. Four of those pulled from the water had drowned.
The regional prefect, Jacques Billant, said the four dead men were thought to be Somalian, Eritrean or Ethiopian. He said 56 passengers were rescued from that shipwreck after their boat – which he described as “very poor quality … under-inflated and under-motorised” – deflated.
Five people, including a seven-year-old girl, also died off the same coastal region on 23 April. Ahmed Alhashimi, 41, said he lost grasp of his daughter, Sara, on the inflatable dinghy after a large group of men rushed onboard as it was pulling away from the shores of Wimereux, south of Calais.
Wednesday’s death takes the total number killed on the perilous crossing from France to Britain this year to 20.
Starmer, who has vowed to tackle the problem by smashing smuggling gangs, will put immigration and border security at the centre of his first summit with European leaders on Thursday.
The prime minister will host 45 European leaders at Blenheim Palace for the European Political Community meeting, the first opportunity for him to begin lobbying for new arrangements for dealing with asylum seekers trying to cross the Channel.
Speaking ahead of Thursday’s European summit, the foreign secretary David Lammy told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We want to work in partnership on how we deal with those smuggling gangs, how we upstream deal with the source of the problems with our combined aid budgets in countries to deter people from leaving in the first place and explaining our position on processing as well in country over the coming months. That’s the discussion that we’re having with over 44 leaders and it’s hugely important to all of them at this time.”
More than 12,000 people have made the crossing so far this year, according to UK Home Office provisional figures released in mid-June.
The figure was 18% higher than for the equivalent point last year, when 10,472 people had made the crossing.