Latest news with #traffickers
Telegraph
2 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
French police fail to stop Channel migrant on crutches
French police failed to prevent a man using a crutch from getting into a migrant boat setting out across the Channel. The man, who leant heavily on the crutch, was one of several dozen people who boarded a dinghy off a stretch of beach near Calais It comes after Sir Keir Starmer admitted that the small-boats crisis is getting worse, and ahead of an expected surge in crossings due to warmer weather. Just after first light on Wednesday morning, the man with the crutch was among a group of migrants, marshalled by a trafficker wearing a mask, who made their way across the long sandy beach at Gravelines and into the shallow waters. French police were nowhere to be seen. His companions had helped him wade out to the boat and cries of encouragement could be heard as he climbed aboard the tiny, overladen dinghy. Unlike many of his fellow passengers, he was not wearing a lifejacket. The number of people arriving on small boats across the Channel so far this year is more than 22 per cent higher than it was by this time in 2024. From the beginning of Jan until June 14, 16,317 migrants crossed to the UK. Last year 13,489 had made the journey by the end of June. On Monday, another 228 people crossed in four boats, according to the latest Home Office figures. A further 134 people had managed to reach the UK on Saturday, in two small boats. On Friday, more than 900 migrants crossed in 14 boats – the single largest number for several weeks. Last Thursday, 52 reached the UK coast in one boat, and the day before 400 had made it across in six small boats. The crossing remains perilous. Since the beginning of the year at least 15 people have died at sea while attempting to cross the Channel, according to the French. In 2024, more than 78 migrants died while attempting to reach the UK. On Saturday, the French coastguard said they had rescued almost 100 people who had attempted the crossing on that day and the previous 24 hours. There has been growing frustration at France's apparent foot-dragging, with it stopping fewer than 40 per cent of boats so far this year. It marks the lowest proportion on record despite a three-year Anglo-French deal costing £480 million to combat the crossings. But France's interior ministry has pledged to come up with a new strategy by the time of Franco-British summit – which begins on July 8 – involving police and gendarmes intercepting migrant boats at sea up to 300 metres from the coast for the first time. Matthew Pennycook, a Labour minister, said the reform was part of a series of changes which he said would allow the UK to cut the number of economic migrants and asylum seekers reaching its shores. French police have already begun to adopt more robust tactics, including dousing beaches with tear gas, to try to stop so many small boats leaving northern France. They are also using drones to spot boats along a 75-mile stretch of coastline, which is policed by hundreds of officers. At Gravelines on Wednesday, police officers appeared to be focusing their efforts further inland in a bid to deter migrants from even reaching the beach. The French authorities claim two-thirds of vessels are already being prevented from leaving. The promised crackdown comes as conditions in the migrant camps in northern France appeared to be deteriorating, with rising tensions among those desperate to leave. Two migrants were shot dead in two separate incidents at camps near the town of Dunkirk on Saturday and Sunday, with around five others wounded. All those involved were reported to be of Sudanese origin. French police said that one migrant was shot and killed at a camp at Loon Plage, outside Dunkirk, on Sunday. The shooting came a day after gunfire killed another man in the same area the previous day and left five others wounded. Armed officers arrested two suspected members of an organised gang on Saturday in connection with one of the shootings. A 29-year-old man who claimed to be from Iraq was held, along with a 16-year-old from Afghanistan, the public prosecutor's office said. Salomé Bahri, a volunteer with Utopia 56, a group working with migrants based near Grande-Synthe, site of a large migrant camp outside Dunkirk, told the InfoMigrants news website that there had been 'a lot of tensions in the area . . . in the last two or three weeks'. She said the situation had worsened because of the authorities' attempt to clear out the camps. One, near Loon Plage, is currently home to between 1,500 to 2,000 people, an increase from around 1,000 last winter. 'The tensions are also caused by the trafficking gangs,' said another volunteer. 'You can't say that all the migrants there are causing these tensions. But everything that is happening there, all this violence is also a consequence of the migration policies being carried out at the border.'
CBC
13-05-2025
- Politics
- CBC
Hunting cocaine traffickers + Rising housing costs
As remote Canadian communities reel from a lethal Colombian cocaine crisis, The National tracks efforts by Canada's navy to hunt down the traffickers. Plus, why construction experts say housing costs will rise until Ottawa revamps immigration policy.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Yahoo
Mourning mother's anger at Kenyan migrant smugglers
As the sun set over Lake Turkana, a mother sobbed and threw flowers into the greenish-blue water to remember her teenage daughter who had drowned trying to reach Kenya via a new route being used by people smugglers. Senait Mebrehtu, a Pentecostal Christian Eritrean who had sought asylum in Kenya three years ago, made the pilgrimage to north-western Kenya to see for herself where 14-year-old Hiyab had lost her life last year. The girl had been travelling with her sister, who survived the late-night crossing over the vast lake, where winds can be powerful. "If the smugglers told me there was such a big and dangerous lake in Kenya, I wouldn't have let my daughters come this far," Ms Senait told the BBC as she sat on the western shoreline. Ms Senait had arrived by plane in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, on a tourist visa with her two younger children, fleeing religious persecution. But she was not allowed to travel with her two other daughters at the time as they were older and nearer the age of conscription. Eritrea is a highly militarised, one-party country - and often national service can go on for years and can include forced labour. The teenagers begged to join her in Kenya, so she consulted relatives who told her they would pay smugglers to get the girls out of Eritrea. The fate of the two girls was put into the hands of traffickers who took them on a weeks-long trip by road and foot from Eritrea into neighbouring Ethiopia - then to the south into Kenya to the north-eastern shores of Lake Turkana, the world's largest permanent desert lake. A female smuggler in Kenya confirmed to the BBC that Lake Turkana was increasingly being used as an illegal crossing for the migrants. "We call it the digital route because it is very new," she said. The trafficker, who earns around $1,500 (£1,130) for each migrant she traffics into or through Kenya (four times the average monthly salary of a Kenyan worker), spoke to us about her work at a secret location and on condition of anonymity. For the last 15 years she has been part of a huge smuggling network that operates across Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa - mainly moving those fleeing Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia. With Kenya having stepped up patrols on its roads, smugglers are now turning to Lake Turkana to get migrants into the country. "Agents" on the new route, she said, received the migrants in the Kenyan fishing village of Lomekwi where road transport was organised to take them to Nairobi - a journey of about 15 hours. Warning of the dangers of travelling on the rickety wooden boats, she appealed to parents not to allow their children to make the crossing alone. "I won't say I love the money I make - because as a mother I can't be happy when I see bad things happening to other women's children," she told the BBC. "I'd like to advise migrants if they'll listen to me. I'd like to beg them to stay in their countries," she said, further cautioning of the callous attitudes of many traffickers. Lake Turkana is the world's largest permanent desert lake [BBC] Osman, an Eritrean migrant who did not want to give his real name for security reasons, made the crossing at the same time as Hiyab and her sister. He recalled how Hiyab's boat capsized in front of his eyes not long after leaving the fishing village of Ileret as it was heading south-west to Lomekwi. "Hiyab was in the boat in front of us - its motor wasn't working and it was being propelled by a strong wind," he said. "They were about 300m [984ft] into the water when their boat overturned, resulting in the deaths of seven people." Hiyab's sister survived by clinging to the sinking boat until another vessel - also operated by the smugglers - came to the rescue. Ms Senait blamed the smugglers for the deaths, saying they overloaded the boat with more than 20 migrants. "The cause of deaths was plain negligence. They put too many people in a small boat that couldn't even carry five people," she said. During the BBC's visit to Lomewki, two fishermen said they saw the bodies of migrants - believed to be Eritreans - floating in the lake, which is around 300km (186 miles) long and 50km wide, in July 2024. "There were about four bodies on the shores. Then, a few days later other bodies appeared," Brighton Lokaala said. Another fisherman, Joseph Lomuria, said he saw the bodies of two men and two women - one of whom appeared to be a teenager. In June 2024, the UN's refugee agency, UNHCR, recorded 345,000 Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers in East Africa, out of 580,000 globally. Like Ms Senait's family, many flee to avoid military conscription in a country that has been embroiled in numerous wars in the region, and where free political and religious activity is not tolerated as the government tries to keep a tight grip on power. Uganda-based Eritrean lawyer, Mula Berhan, told the BBC that Kenya and Uganda were increasingly becoming the preferred destination of these migrants because of conflict in Ethiopia and Sudan, which both neighbour Eritrea. The female smuggler said in her experience some of the migrants settled in Kenya, but others used the country as a transit point to reach Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa, believing it easier to get refugee status there. The smuggling network operates in all these countries, handing over migrants to different "agents" until they reach their final destination, which - in some cases - can also be Europe or North America. Her job is to hand over those migrants who are in transit in Nairobi to agents who keep them in "holding houses" until the next leg of their trip is arranged and paid for. By this stage each migrant has probably paid around $5,000 for the journey up to that point. The BBC saw a room in a block of flats that was being used as a holding house. Five Eritrean men were locked inside the room, which had one mattress. In the holding houses, migrants are expected to pay rent and also pay for their food - and the smuggler said she knew of three men and a young woman who had died of hunger as they had run out of cash. She said the agents simply disposed of the bodies and called their deaths bad luck. "Smugglers keep lying to the families saying their people are alive, and they keep on sending money," she acknowledged. Women migrants, she said, were often sexually abused or forced to get married to male smugglers. She said she herself had no intention of giving up the lucrative trade but felt others should be aware of what could be ahead of them. It is little comfort for Ms Senait, who still mourns the death of her 14-year-old while expressing relief that her elder daughter survived and was unharmed by the smugglers. "We have gone through what every Eritrean family is going through," she said. "May God heal our land and deliver us from all this." The map showing the route some Eritreans are now taking to travel to Kenya and Uganda [BBC] You may also be interested in: [Getty Images/BBC] Go to for more news from the African continent. Follow us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica BBC Africa podcasts
