At least 12 people, mostly women, have been killed in an unseaworthy boat attempting to gain access to the United Kingdom’s southern border.
At least 12 people, mostly women, have been killed in an unseaworthy boat attempting to gain access to the United Kingdom’s southern border.
The death toll of migrants attempting to break into Britain tragically rises again, as smugglers cram people into unseaworthy boats in return for considerable sums of money, a trade which has been described as “appalling and callous”. At least 12 people were killed when a rubber smuggler’s boat broke up in the English Channel on Tuesday.
British broadcaster the BBC states ten of those who died were women or girls, and six were minors. At least one of those women was pregnant. It is stated the migrants, who were apparently travelling to the United Kingdom as part of the vast smuggler’s trade in humans across Europe bidding to escape normal border controls, were “primarily of Eritrean origin”.
Farage: Turn Back Migrant Boats Like Australia or More People Will Die https://t.co/VcUUyzbNiu
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) December 3, 2020
French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said of the “terrible shipwreck” that the provisional toll stood at 12 dead, two missing, and “several injured”. At least 19 people had already died in the English Channel earlier this year, and today’s sinking may take the presumed number of deaths to 31. Meanwhile, over 21,000 people have crossed the Channel this year so far, an increase on the rate of 2023.
Referring to a common French criticism of the United Kingdom — that it implicitly condones people smuggling by not tackling its shadow economy that employs illegal migrants — Darmanin said today: “We need a treaty – a migration treaty between the UK and the European Union – because the people who go now [are] people from the core of Africa who want to go to the UK and they want to join their families and they actually work in conditions that would not be accepted [in] France.
