Smugglers offer Christmas discounts to cross the Channel on overcrowded boats
LONDON: People smugglers have slashed Channel crossing prices by up to £435 ($528) by cramming migrants onto boats, the Mirror reported on Sunday
Kurdish smugglers are reportedly marketing themselves as the cheapest Christmas deals to enter the UK illegally by boat in Calais.
“Smugglers are taking whatever they can to fill the boats and drive down the price, the more they are trying to get on board. We know they are overcrowded. Lucy, operations co-ordinator at the charity Care4Calais Holiday told the Mirror.
This comes after four people died when their small boat capsized in the icy water on Wednesday.
An Afghan man told the Sunday People that he tried to board the boat, but was told by smugglers that the boat was full.
“We had walked 10 hours to the beach, but there were already a lot of people on board. There were many Afghans and a lot of women and children. It was a mixed group,” he said.
After meeting an Afghan middleman in a refugee camp, the 27-year-old doctor said he agreed to pay £2,000 to take her to the UK. He was in contact with Kurdish smugglers through WhatsApp.
Having already paid £7,000 to other smugglers to take him from Afghanistan to Calais, he said he is waiting to board the next available boat to Britain, where he aspires to work for the NHS .
A UK government spokesman said in a statement that an inquiry had been launched into Wednesday’s tragedy.
Jalal Siddiq, who fled the war in Sudan in 2016, told the Mirror that he has spent the past few months in a refugee camp in Kailasa, where there used to be a branch of the Lidl supermarket.
“I applied to stay in France as an asylum seeker, but they didn’t accept me. Now I want to go to England to study. The French say I had my fingerprints in Italy, so I have to go back there and seek asylum,” Siddiq said.
“I had to leave my wife in Sudan because the road is difficult here, but I hope to be reunited with her in England,” said the 24-year-old.
He told the Mirror that after a trip to Libya, he paid around £340 to board a crowded boat to an island in southern Italy. But he, like many African refugees who have been trapped in camps for months, cannot afford the boat to Britain and tries to jump on a lorry at 4am every day.
“Boats are very expensive, so this is my only option,” Siddiq told the Mirror.
Critics have slammed the UK’s £63million deal with France to boost coastal patrols announced in November, with Conservative MP for Dover Natalie Elficke saying it “falls short of what is needed”.
Holiday said, “The British government has blood on its hands.”
Police in France have also come under fire for failing to stop the crossing.
The Mirror reported that since 2018, total spending to deal with the crisis has reached £175 million. Meanwhile, more than 44,711 people have crossed the Channel in small boats this year.