Migrant dies during English Channel crossing

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Migrant dies during English Channel crossing

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Migrants cross the English Channel on a small boat in 2024

A migrant has died during an attempt to cross the Channel in a small boat from northern France to England, French maritime authorities have said.

The Kuwaiti national, in his sixties, suffered a cardiac arrest on the boat that was carrying him and other migrants on Saturday, the Pas-de-Calais prefecture said.

The boat returned to the beach but despite the efforts of police and medics the man was declared dead at the scene, it added.

He is the sixth person to have died while attempting to cross the Channel this year.

The boat set off from Calais in northern France on Saturday morning and “very quickly returned to the beach with a person in cardio-respiratory arrest on board”, the French maritime prefecture of the Channel and the North Sea told AFP news agency.

“This boat set off again once it had dropped off the people who wanted to disembark on the beach,” it added.

Authorities said the boat was “quite heavily loaded” but did not say how many people were on board.

Home Office figures show that more than 1,600 migrants have crossed the Channel in small boats in the past week, with 51 people arriving on Friday alone.

At least 3,720 people have made the crossing to date this year, an increase of 11% on the same ******* last year.

A record number of migrants died while attempting to make the dangerous crossing in 2024.

According to the Office for the Fight against Illicit Trafficking of Migrants, 78 people died while trying to reach England aboard small boats last year, the highest number since the first crossing in 2018.

The *** and France have ramped up efforts to stop Channel crossings, including intensifying patrols on French beaches, intercepting small boats and apprehending the smugglers who organise the crossings.

In a statement on Friday, the Home Office said: “We all want to end dangerous small boat crossings, which threaten lives and undermine our border security.

“The people-smuggling gangs do not care if the vulnerable people they exploit live or die, as long as they pay. We will stop at nothing to dismantle their business models and bring them to justice.”

On 27 February, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper met her French counterpart, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, to agree a raft of measures aimed at tackling people-smuggling gangs.

These include a new specialist intelligence and judicial police unit in Dunkirk to speed up the arrest and prosecution of people-smugglers and training drone pilots to help intercept boats before they reach the sea.

French authorities will stop migrants on land but not once they take to the sea.

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