People smugglers are dangerously overloading boats in the Channel by offering desperate migrants crossings for less than £500 billed as cut-price Christmas deals.
Kurdish gangsters are making the callous offers in Calais just days after four people died when their tiny boat sank in the icy waters. And the prices on offer are believed to be the cheapest fees ever charged for entering the UK illegally by boat.
Last night, Lucy Halliday of the Care4Calais charity said: “Some are paying as little as €500 (£435). The smugglers are taking what they can to fill boats and the lower the price, the more they try to get on board. We know they’re overcrowded.”
Lucy has witnessed multiple crossing bids every day in the French port since she arrived there in February. She said: “The British Government has blood on its hands.
“Migrants died because of the Government’s hostile position. Instead of spending £5million on hotels, the Home Office should spend it on clearing the asylum backlog. These are traumatised people being denied their human rights.”
French police have also been blasted for failing to stop the crossings, despite the UK agreeing a £63million deal to bolster coastal patrols last month. Total spending has now reached £175million since the crisis began in 2018. And so far this year, more than 44,711 people have crossed the Channel in small boats.
One Afghan man told the Sunday People he had tried to get on the boat that capsized on Wednesday morning but traffickers told him it was full. The man, who asked not to be named, said: “We had walked ten hours to the beach but there were already too many people on board. There were many Afghans and lots of women and children. It was a mixed group.”
The 27-year-old – a doctor in his homeland – said he agreed to pay Kurds £2,000 to get him to the UK after meeting an Afghan middleman in the camp. He was then put in contact with them via WhatsApp.
He had already paid another gang £7,000 to get him from Afghanistan to Calais and is now waiting to be told where to board a boat to the UK, where he dreams of working in the NHS.
He said: “I’ve got on three boats but each time the police caught us and held it. I’ve had bad luck. I know it is dangerous but I will keep trying. If I could travel legally with a visa I would but they are not giving them to people from my country.”
On the outskirts of Calais, Jalal Siddiq, 24, from Darfur, Sudan, told us he fled war in his country in 2016. He has spent the past few months in a squalid satellite camp known as Old Lidl, as it once housed a branch of the supermarket.
He travelled to Libya before paying about £340 to board a packed boat to the island of Lampedusa, off Italy.
Jalal said: “I applied to stay as an asylum seeker in France but they didn’t accept me. Now I want to go to England to study. The French say I was fingerprinted in Italy so I have to go back there and seek asylum. I had to leave my wife in Sudan as the road here is difficult but I hope to be reunited with her in England.”
Like many Africans stranded in camps – some for up six months – he cannot afford a boat, so he tries to jump on to lorries from 4am every morning. Jalal said: “The boats are too expensive, so it’s my only option.”
An investigation into Wednesday’s tragedy is under way.
