Three arrested after migrant deaths in channel
Three men have been arrested after the deaths of five migrants including a seven-year-old child in the channel on Tuesday.
The men, two Sudanese nationals aged 22 and 19, and a South Sudan national aged 22, were arrested on suspicion of facilitating illegal immigration and entering the UK illegally.
They were detained on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning by the National Crime Agency (NCA) and partners in Immigration Enforcement and will now be questioned by investigators from the NCA at a police station in Kent.
The crossings included 58 migrants who refused to leave the boat in which the five were trampled or crushed to death on Tuesday.
The arrivals came just hours after Parliament passed legislation aimed at getting the Government’s plan to give asylum seekers a one-way ticket to Rwanda off the ground.
The dinghy carrying 112 people set off from Wimereux at around 6am on Tuesday but got into difficulty. A seven year old girl, a woman and three men died in a crush on the “heavily laden” boat after panic broke out several hundred yards from the shore when the engine cut out, said police.
Some 49 people were rescued but 58 others refused to leave the boat and continued their journey towards the UK, with several other boats later embarking on the crossing.
Home Office figures show 402 people made the journey in seven boats that same day after an eight-day break in activity in the Channel, which suggests there was an average of around 57 people per boat.
Young children and babies were among those seen being brought ashore in Dover, Kent, while witnesses described how crews carried someone on a stretcher from a lifeboat to an ambulance.
The latest crossings take the provisional total for the year so far to 6,667 – 20 per cent higher than this time last year (5,546) but slightly lower (down 0.4 per cent) than the figure recorded at this stage in 2022 (6,691).
Rishi Sunak said criminal gangs were exploiting the vulnerable and “packing more and more people into these unseaworthy dinghies”. Speaking during a flight to Poland, he said the tragedy “underscores why you need a deterrent”.
“This is what tragically happens when they push people out to sea and that’s why, for matters of compassion more than anything else, we must actually break this business model and end this unfairness of people coming to our country illegally,” he said.
The NCA said it would be supporting the French investigation into the deaths with UK police and Border Force. Some 29,437 made the journey in 2023, down 36 per cent on a record 45,774 arrivals in 2022.
