A woman and a child died off Calais, on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday May 21, trying to cross the Channel clandestinely, said the maritime prefecture of the English Channel and the North Sea (Prémar). These deaths bring to five the number of people who died in the English Channel by trying to rally the United Kingdom in the past ten days, according to a count of the France-Presse (AFP) agency from official figures.
A French navy ship intervened at the request of passengers from an overloaded clandestine canoe carrying around 80 candidates for exile, said the Prémar. Ten passengers asked to be taken care of and two others, a woman and a child, were found dead in the canoe, added the premar, specifying that the boat had then continued its route to Great Britain.
“Small boats”, precarious boats
Already on Monday, the premar had announced that a sinking had died and a disappeared after an overloaded boat had dislocated. And on May 11, a migrant person died and several were injured during a sinking off Hardelot, near Boulogne-sur-Mer (Pas-de-Calais) “Following the loss of the backboard where the engine was fixed”.
By including the last two deaths, at least 15 people have died since the beginning of 2025 trying to reach England aboard Small Boatsthese precarious clandestine boats. In 2024, 78 migrants died in these crossings of the Franco-British border, a record since the start of this phenomenon in the region in 2018.
Source: Lemonde