On a chilly, rainy November night, Issa Mohamed Omar and greater than 30 different males, ladies and kids prompt from their casual camp close to the northern French port town of Dunkirk. They walked throughout the darkness in near-silence for round two hours, till they reached the seaside from the place they was hoping to begin a brand new and higher lifestyles.
As they arrived, 5 males had been busy pumping up an inflatable dinghy and attaching an outboard engine. Those other folks smugglers had charged each and every in their shoppers greater than 1000 euros for a travel that prices somebody with the appropriate passport not up to 100.
The travellers got life-vests, organized into rows and counted. “There are 33 of you,” one of the vital smugglers mentioned. For plenty of on board, this was once now not their first strive at attaining England.
Maximum got here from Iraqi Kurdistan, together with Kazhal Ahmed Khidir Al-Jammoor from Erbil, who was once travelling together with her 3 kids: Hadiya, Mubin and Hasti Rizghar Hussein, respectively elderly 22, 16 and 7.
A father and son from Egypt had been proven how the engine labored and supplied a GPS tool and instructions to Dover, round 35 miles (60km) to the west around the Channel. Mohamed Omar would later recall:
The Egyptian guy was once put in control of guidance the boat via the smugglers. He was once travelling together with his son, who seemed like he was once in his overdue teenagers or perhaps early 20s. I have no idea how they got here to be the driving force and navigator.
There have been additionally a minimum of 3 Ethiopian nationals – one in every of whom, father-of-two Fikiru Shiferaw from Addis Ababa, despatched his spouse Emebet at domestic in Ethiopia a last WhatsApp voice message:
We’ve got already boarded the boat. We’re at the method. I can flip off my telephone now. Goodnight, I can name you day after today morning.
Those had been the ultimate phrases she would ever obtain from her husband.
Gendarmes in Calais guard a warehouse the place our bodies of those that died within the Channel on November 24 2021 had been mentioned to were transported.
Stefan Rousseau/PA Pictures/Alamy Inventory Picture
What came about to Fikiru Shiferaw and the opposite passengers at the evening of November 23-24 2021 has been the topic of the United Kingdom’s Cranston Inquiry which, right through March 2025, heard from 22 witnesses to the crisis, together with officials taken with the United Kingdom’s search-and-rescue (SAR) reaction. Chaired via former Prime Court docket pass judgement on Sir Ross Cranston, the unbiased inquiry additionally heard from Mohamed Omar from Somalia – one in every of handiest two survivors – in addition to members of the family of lots of the useless and lacking.
Those hearings now not handiest make clear the movements of UK Border Drive and His Majesty’s Coastguard officials right through the failed rescue operation – designated Incident Charlie – within the early hours of November 24, however the companies’ solution to “small boat crossings” usually courting again to 2017.
Consistent with the testimonies, officials have been working beneath excessive force within the months main as much as the crisis. Kevin Toy, grasp of the Border Drive send Valiant which was once despatched out to seek for the lacking dinghy that evening, defined that within the run-up to the incident, “night after night” he may just see his team had been “utterly exhausted” via the top in their shifts.
The proof presentations the British govt was once acutely aware of the rising chance that Border Drive and HM Coastguard might be beaten via the emerging selection of small boat crossings – and that folks would possibly die in consequence. In Would possibly 2020, a report produced via the Division for Delivery stated that “SAR resources can be overwhelmed if current incident numbers persist”. No less than 3 senior HM Coastguard officials known the similar chance in August 2021.
More than one communique disasters have additionally been uncovered via the inquiry – amongst British officials, with their counterparts in France, and between each international locations’ emergency services and products and the more and more determined other folks aboard the sinking dinghy.
In spite of a lot of misery calls and GPS coordinates being shared by way of WhatsApp, a rescue boat failed to succeed in the travellers in time. Amid the confusion, when their calls stopped, the coastguard assumed Charlie’s passengers have been picked up and had been protected. In truth, they had been perishing within the chilly waters of the Channel over greater than ten hours.
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However, after talking to representatives for Mohamed Omar and the bereaved households in addition to migrant rights organisations, greater questions have emerged. Specifically, given the inquiry’s singular center of attention in this one catastrophic tournament in November 2021, the ones I spoke to are involved that its suggestions won’t be able to stop additional deaths from going on within the Channel, that have risen dramatically during the last 18 months.
An overcrowded inflatable dinghy on the earth’s busiest transport lane, the Channel.
Tolga Akmen/EPA
How ‘small boat crossings’ started
Since the United Kingdom and France started working “juxtaposed” border controls within the early Nineteen Nineties (which means border assessments happen earlier than departure), asylum seekers attempting to succeed in England have needed to make abnormal trips around the Channel. Till 2018, those had been generally aboard trains and ferries – after sneaking directly to a lorry or thru a French port’s perimeter safety.
On the time of the “Jungle” camp close to Calais in 2015-16, media protection of collective makes an attempt via its citizens to go into French ports spiked UK govt funding within the border. Between 2014 and 2018, it gave its French counterpart a minimum of £123 million to “strengthen the border and maintain juxtaposed controls”. Those price range paid for French police to patrol the ports and border towns, incessantly evict migrants’ dwelling websites, and finance detention and relocation centres.
As admitted via then-home secretary Sajid Javid in 2019, this larger safety led other folks to seek out different ways around the Channel. Starting within the wintry weather of 2018, smugglers organised trips in small, seaworthy vessels they’d stolen from marinas alongside the French coast. Those “small boats” proceed to lend their title to this migration phenomenon – but the unseaworthy inflatable dinghies used lately, without a keel or inflexible hull, aren’t worthy of the title.
Then-UK domestic secretary, Sajid Javid, assembly Border Drive personnel in January 2019, in a while after stating a significant incident within the Channel.
Gareth Fuller/Pool/EPA
Even within the context of the standard sensationalism surrounding abnormal migration to the United Kingdom, small boat trips had been met with a particularly intense reaction, each politically and within the media.
When 101 other folks crossed between Christmas and New 12 months in 2018, Javid declared it a significant incident. Ever since, “stopping the boats” has been one of the vital UK govt’s best priorities. In spite of small boat arrivals making up handiest 29% of UK asylum claimants in 2018-24, billions of kilos were spent to take a look at and keep an eye on the path.
Frosty family members and the ‘pushback’ plan
As Channel crossings rose sharply over 2020-21, worsening family members between France and the United Kingdom because of Brexit difficult how the 2 governments labored in combination to reply. In his testimony, former clandestine Channel danger commander Dan O’Mahoney – appointed via Javid’s successor, Priti Patel, to “make small boat crossings unviable” – described family members between the 2 international locations as already “very frosty” when he started in August 2020.
After France’s then-interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, axed a plan for UK vessels to take rescued migrants again to Dunkirk, O’Mahoney was once tasked via senior ministers to get a hold of another. The ensuing “pushback” plan, referred to as Operation Sommen, concerned Border Drive officials on jet skis riding into migrant dinghies to show them again as they crossed the border line into UK waters. When France realized of the plan, O’Mahoney recalled:
They concept it went counter to their and our responsibilities round protection of lifestyles at sea … They objected to it very strongly, and it affected our already reasonably strained dating with them additional.
Operation Sommen was once deserted in April 2022 earlier than having ever been utilized in anger. On the other hand, arrangements had been mentioned to have taken up “a very considerable amount of time and resource” at each the House Workplace and the Maritime and Coastguard Company – and had “a detrimental effect” on the United Kingdom’s general SAR reaction to small boat crossings.
At a gathering of senior officers in June 2021 to talk about Operation Sommen, ministers had made transparent that the “numbers of people crossing [was] a political problem” – and that making improvements to SAR features didn’t “fit with [the] narrative of taking back control of borders”.
Despite the fact that senior HM Coastguard officials recognised “it is extremely difficult to locate small boats or communicate with those onboard”, the inquiry heard that officials didn’t recall receiving “any small boat training before November 2021”, rather than within the process to permit Border Drive to push them again to French waters.
The pinnacle of Border Drive’s Maritime Command, Stephen Whitton, advised the inquiry he was once beneath “a huge amount of pressure” to stop small boat crossings, whilst additionally “providing the bulk of the support to search and rescue”. In spite of sporting out 90% of all small boat rescues within the Channel and “regularly being overwhelmed”, Border Drive Maritime Command gained “no additional assets to manage the search and rescue response” earlier than November 2021.
A Border Drive send rescues other folks crossing the English Channel on a dinghy in August 2023.
Tolga Akmen/EPA
‘The pressure we were under’
When the verdict was once taken for Border Drive – a regulation enforcement slightly than search-and-rescue organisation – to be the main responders to small boat crossings in 2018, handiest round 100 other folks had been crossing each and every month. But by the point of the crisis 3 years later, in keeping with an inside House Workplace report, the whole for 2021 was once “already more than 25,000”.
On the inquiry, O’Mahoney said: “As 2021 went on, it became much clearer that … frankly, we just needed more [rescue] boats.” Whitton admitted that earlier than the crisis, Border Drive, HM Coastguard, the Royal Nationwide Lifeboat Establishment and different improve organisations had been all “on our knees in terms of the pressure we were under, and it was getting hugely challenging”.
The proof presentations this force was once acutely felt within Dover’s Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre, which sits atop the port’s well-known white cliffs providing a commanding view of the Channel. Within, Coastguard officials coordinate SAR operations and keep an eye on vessel site visitors within the Dover Strait – one of the vital global’s busiest transport lanes.
At the evening of November 23-24, 3 coastguard officials had been on search-and-rescue responsibility: staff chief Neal Gibson, maritime operations officer Stuart Downs, and a trainee – unnamed via the inquiry – who was once formally handiest provide as an observer.
HM Coastguard’s Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre at Dover overlooking the Channel.
Travis Van Isacker, CC BY-NC-SA
Staffing seems to were a longstanding factor on the Dover coastguard station the place, in keeping with divisional commander Mike Invoice, there was once “poor retention of staff” and “experience and competence weren’t the best”. Most effective the day earlier than the crisis, right through a migrant pink days assembly – convened when, because of excellent climate, the chance of Channel crossers is regarded as “highly likely” – leader coastguard Peter Mizen had warned that handiest having two certified officials at Dover on nights “isn’t enough”.
Over fresh months, because the station had grow to be busier responding to small boat crossings and within the wake of an unsuccessful recruitment pressure, personnel had been having to paintings flat-out all over their shifts, and had been being requested to return in on scheduled days off.
At the evening of November 23-24, owing to personnel shortages, staff chief Gibson advised the inquiry he needed to quilt site visitors keep an eye on tasks for 3 hours from 10.30pm. This supposed he was once clear of the SAR table at 00.41am, when a message arrived from the nationwide rescue coordination centre alongside the coast in Fareham, mentioning that the Coastguard’s scheduled surveillance aeroplanes would now not be flying over the Channel that evening because of fog.
The officials had been advised they might be “effectively blind” – and will have to now not permit themselves “to be drawn into relaxing and expecting a normal migrant crossing night”. The message warned: “This has the potential to be very dangerous.”
‘Their boat – there’s not anything left’
Consistent with Mohamed Omar, the ocean was once calm when he and the opposite passengers departed the French seaside round 9pm UK time. Giving his proof to the Cranston Inquiry from Paris – he nonetheless can’t trip to the United Kingdom – a boat approached them round an hour into their voyage:
They got here as much as us to peer what we had been doing, and shone a mild on us. I be mindful seeing a French flag at the boat. It was once a large boat and I’m positive it was once the French coastguard. I had heard from other folks I met within the camp in Dunkirk that this came about from time to time, and that the French boat would apply till you reached English waters.
In truth, Mohamed Omar mentioned, the French send left the travellers once more after about an hour. In a while after this, the issues started.
A French warship patrols the shore of Mardyck in northern France, on the subject of the place Charlie is assumed to have departed.
Travis Van Isacker, CC BY-NC-SA
Round 1am, seawater started coming into the dinghy. Through now, it was once within the neighborhood of the Sandettie lightvessel, round 20 miles north-east of Dover. In the beginning, passengers controlled to bail out the 13°C water – however quickly the flooding changed into uncontrollable. The dinghy’s inflatable tube started dropping force, and a few the Kurdish males used air pumps to take a look at to stay it inflated. Others attempted to stop panic spreading a few of the passengers.
Somewhat than ship a French boat, Le Monde reported that the officer phoned her opposite numbers in Dover to warn them a dinghy 0.6 nautical miles from the border line would quickly be crossing into UK waters. At the different finish of the road was once the trainee officer, who was once dealing with regimen calls that evening regardless of formally handiest being an observer.
After the decision completed, in keeping with Downs’s proof to the inquiry, the trainee mistakenly advised him the dinghy was once considered “in good condition” – data he recorded within the log for Incident Charlie. This miscommunication could have affected the urgency of the United Kingdom’s SAR reaction, combating HM Coastguard and Border Drive from appreciating the serious misery the “broken” dinghy was once in.
Simply earlier than 1am, the French coastguard had despatched its migrant tracker spreadsheet, containing data on all small boat crossings that evening, to HM Coastguard for the primary time. It confirmed 4 migrant dinghies at sea – which Gris-Nez have been acutely aware of “for many hours”, in keeping with Gibson.
The problem of the French coastguard showing to withhold details about energetic small boat crossings have been raised via HM Coastguard’s clandestine operations liaison officer right through a July 2021 evaluate. And previous that very night, Gibson advised one in every of his colleagues:
Once in a while they simply appear to stay it quiet. Like we’ll now not get anything else – then we’ll get a tracker at 3 within the morning with 15 incidents, and so they pass: ‘Mostly these are in your search-and-rescue region.’ Glorious.
UK Border Drive’s cutter send Valiant.
Neil Watkin/Alamy
At 1.20am, Downs phoned Border Drive Maritime Command in Portsmouth to request a Border Drive vessel seek for the dinghy Charlie. He supplied the GPS place gained from his French counterpart and the selection of other folks onboard – but additionally the improper data that “they think it’s in good condition”.
Ten mins later, the Valiant, Border Drive’s 42-metre patrol send stationed at Dover, was once tasked to continue against the Sandettie lightvessel. On the similar time, the primary direct name to the Dover rescue coordination centre got here in from Charlie. The distressed caller mentioned they had been “in the water” and that “everything [was] finished”.
Round quarter-hour later, at 1.48am, Gibson took a choice from 16-year-old Mubin Rizghar Hussein, who spoke excellent English. In spite of the noise and commotion, he controlled to offer Gibson with a WhatsApp quantity – with the intention to percentage their GPS place. The transcript of this name data voices shouting within the background: “It’s finished. Finished. Brother, it’s finished.”
A ‘grave and imminent threat to life’
Gibson advised the inquiry that once his name with Rizghar Hussein, he had a “gut feeling that this doesn’t feel quite as usual”. Through “usual” he supposed what was once, in keeping with maritime operations officer Downs, a frequently held trust on the Dover coastguard station that with “nine out of ten”“ callers from small boats: “It would generally be overstated that the boat … was sinking, people were drowning … Whatever was going on would be overstated.”
Performing on his intestine feeling, at 2.27am Gibson took the unheard of resolution to broadcast a Mayday Relay – denoting a “grave and imminent threat to life”. Through maritime regulation, this alert required different vessels to supply their help.
Gibson advised the inquiry he did this to get the French warship Flamant to reply. He may just see on his radar display screen that Flamant was once closest to Charlie’s place and was once the most efficient vessel to rescue the folk if the dinghy actually was once sinking.
Why the Flamant didn’t reply is on the centre of an ongoing prison investigation in France into two of the warship’s officials and 5 coastguards from Gris-Nez, for “non-assistance of persons in distress”. This investigation’s strict confidentiality legal responsibility manner the inquiry was once not able to get entry to any data from the French aspect about their operations that evening.
At 2.01 and once more at 2.14am, HM Coastguard had gained new GPS positions by way of WhatsApp appearing the dinghy to be greater than a mile within UK waters.
Valiant, having been tasked at 1.30am, handiest exited the port of Dover at 2.22am and would want a minimum of every other hour to succeed in the Sandettie. In spite of this, no different vessel was once despatched to enroll in the hunt. At 3.11am, when requested right through a choice via Border Drive Maritime Command whether or not Charlie was once “still a Mayday situation”, Gibson answered: “Well, they’ve told me it’s full of water.”
With a complete of 4 small boats being proven within the Channel that evening via the French tracker spreadsheet, Gibson recommended there might be as many as 110 other folks on board those dinghies – past Valiant’s skill for taking up survivors. However, Border Drive and HM Coastguard opted to “wait and see what the numbers are, and whether Valiant can deal with that … We don’t want to call any other assets out just yet.”
In a choice with Christopher Trubshaw, captain of the Coastguard rescue helicopter stationed at Lydd at the Kent coast, aviation tactical commander Dominic Golden defined that Border Drive was once “not prepared to bring in their crews who are pretty knackered” until “we can convince them there are people in real danger”. He then requested Trubshaw to go looking the Channel for the small boats proven within the French tracker, because the surveillance aeroplanes have been not able to take off.
In her last submission to the inquiry, Sonali Naik, a criminal consultant of the survivors and bereaved households, highlighted Golden’s “dismissive attitude” against Charlie’s misery when he gave Trubshaw the cause of the request, which incorporated the next:
As standard, {the catalogue} of telephone calls is starting to trickle in … You already know, the vintage ‘I am lost, I am sinking, my mother’s wheelchair is falling over the aspect’ and many others. ‘Sharks with lasers surrounding boat’ and ‘we are all dying’ form of factor.
However, Golden requested the helicopter team to pack a liferaft. “I can’t imagine we’re going to need it but … potentially you get to play with one of your new toys.”
Whilst Golden described his phrases as “unwise” or “flippant”, Naik mentioned they had been “more than that” – suggesting they published rescuers’ basic perceptions of the occupants of small boats and the commonly held scepticism against their misery calls.
‘We are dying. Where is the boat?’
With the water within emerging rapid and their dinghy collapsing, Charlie’s more and more determined passengers saved looking to get rescuers to understand how dire their state of affairs was once.
At 2.31am within the Dover rescue coordination centre, Gibson gained a 2nd name from Mubin Rizghar Hussein, who pleaded: “We are dying, where is the boat?”
Gibson answered: “The boat is on its way but it has to get …” handiest to be interrupted via Rizghar Hussein pronouncing: “We all die. We all die.”
“I get that,” Gibson advised the terrified youngster, “but unfortunately, you’re going to be patient and all stay together, because I can’t make the boat come any quicker.” He ended the decision pronouncing:
You wish to have to forestall making calls as a result of each and every time you are making a choice, we predict there’s every other boat in the market – and we don’t need to unintentionally pass chasing for every other boat when it’s if truth be told your boat we’re in search of.
Gibson broke down in short when recounting this 2nd name right through his proof to the inquiry, explaining:
Should you don’t perceive what’s absolutely happening and also you’re getting ‘we’re all going to die’, it’s reasonably a distressing state of affairs to seek out your self in, sitting on the finish of a telephone – successfully helpless. You already know the place they’re, you need to get a ship to them, and you’ll’t.
Name data additionally display that coastguards on either side of the Channel handed duty for rescuing the sinking dinghy off to each other. Consistent with Le Monde, right through one name a passenger advised the French coastguard officer he was once “in the water” – to which she answered: “Yes, but you are in English waters.”
The transcript of the ultimate name earlier than Charlie capsized, made at 3.12am, unearths that Downs requested “where are you?” 17 instances – regardless of the caller being not able to respond to anything else past “English waters”. The maritime operations officer completed via teaching the caller to hold up and dial 999: “If it won’t connect on 999, then you’re probably still in French waters.”
In her last submission, Naik pointed to “discriminatory stereotypes and attitudes towards migrants on small boats which fatally affected the SAR response” for Charlie – as rescuers, in her phrases, “jumped to premature conclusions”. Consistent with survivor Mohamed Omar:
As a result of we’ve got been noticed as refugees … that’s the explanation why I imagine the rescue, they didn’t come in any respect. We really feel like we had been … handled like animals.
Deadly assumptions
At 3.27am, Border Drive’s send Valiant arrived at Charlie’s ultimate recorded GPS place (from 2.14am) – however discovered not anything. Its grasp, Kevin Toy, determined to move north-easterly against the Sandettie lightvessel, the best way the tide was once flowing.
En path, Valiant noticed two different dinghies within the darkness the usage of its evening imaginative and prescient – one nonetheless making its method against the English coast, the opposite stopped within the water. The desk bound dinghy was once in better threat from the Channel’s transport site visitors, so Valiant went to it and started rescuing the ones onboard – radioing again that it had “engaged unlit migrant crafts stopped in the water” with roughly 40 other folks onboard.
Within the Dover rescue coordination centre, Gibson assumed this dinghy might be Charlie and gave Mubin Rizghar Hussein’s title and phone quantity so Valiant’s team may just check whether or not he was once on board. At 4.16am, Gibson himself attempted calling the WhatsApp quantity that Rizghar Hussein had shared, however the name failed.
At 4.20am, Valiant finished its first rescue of the morning. Two extra adopted after the Coastguard helicopter noticed two different dinghies within the Sandettie space – however no person within the water. A near-capacity Valiant then returned to Dover simply after 8am with 98 survivors on board.
Border Drive officers convey rescued small boat passengers to Dover at the day after Incident Charlie.
Stuart Brock/EPA
Not one of the 3 rescued dinghies matched the outline of Charlie. All had been in excellent situation, in a different way colored, and with disparate numbers of other folks onboard – but the out of place assumption Charlie have been rescued endured amid the evening’s murky data atmosphere. Gibson said that, whilst he had quickly gained more information matching Valiant’s first rescue to another dinghy, he was once nonetheless “fairly certain Charlie had been picked up”.
“Once Valiant had picked up these [three] boats,” he defined, “we no longer received calls from Charlie, and a call to a known phone number on Charlie failed.” In consequence, neither Valiant nor the Coastguard helicopter had been despatched again out to proceed looking for the troubled dinghy.
In truth, Gibson’s name to Rizghar Hussein’s WhatsApp quantity didn’t fail as a result of Charlie’s passengers have been rescued – nor as a result of they’d thrown their telephones into the ocean when Border Drive arrived. Somewhat, it was once for the reason that dinghy had capsized and everybody had fallen into the Channel’s freezing waters.
‘No one came to our rescue’
In harrowing proof to the inquiry, Mohamed Omar defined how, as one aspect of the dinghy deflated, the passengers – “hysterical and crying” – panicked and moved to the other aspect. This shift in weight brought about the dinghy to capsize:
The screaming when the boat tipped and other folks fell within the water was once deafening. I’ve by no means heard anything else as determined as this. I used to be now not fascinated with whether or not we had been going to be rescued any longer; it was once all about the way to keep alive.
Because the passengers had been thrown into the water, the dinghy flipped on most sensible of them. Mohamed Omar described having to swim out from beneath to catch a breath: “It was dark and I could not really see. It was extremely cold and the sea was rough.”
As he surfaced, he noticed Halima Mohammed Shikh, a mom of 3 additionally from Somalia and travelling by myself, suffering as she couldn’t swim. She screamed his title for assist, and he attempted to get her again to what was once left of the dinghy – however couldn’t. “I think she was one of the first people to drown,” he advised the inquiry.
Others controlled to dangle to the damaged inflatable, hoping rescue was once on its method – however “no one came to our rescue”. Driven and pulled via the waves, some misplaced their grip and drifted away earlier than first light. Mohamed Omar recalled:
All evening, I used to be keeping directly to what remained of the boat. Within the morning, I may just pay attention the folk had been screaming and the whole thing. It’s one thing I can’t put out of your mind in my thoughts.
By the point the solar after all rose at 7.26am, he estimated that not more than 15 other folks had been left clinging to the damaged dinghy – adrift at the tide in a hectic transport lane:
I don’t recall talking with any person within the water. Those that had been alive had been half-dead. There was once not anything lets do any longer. I may just see our bodies floating throughout us within the water. I presume the general public had been both already useless or had been subconscious.
In a while afterwards, Mohamed Omar mentioned he let pass of the dinghy and started to swim, considering to himself: “I am going to die [but] I don’t want to die here. At least if I die whilst swimming, I won’t feel it.”
He swam against a ship he may just see within the distance and, as he were given nearer, started to wave his lifestyles jacket for consideration. A French girl, out fishing together with her circle of relatives, noticed him and jumped within the water to save lots of him.
As he completed telling his tale, Mohamed Omar advised the inquiry: “I’m a voice for those people who passed away.”
A tender kid at Dover docks after being picked up within the Channel on November 25 2021.
Stuart Brock/EPA
Our bodies are discovered
Days later, when the accounts of Mohamed Omar’s fellow survivor, Mohammed Shekha Ahmad from Iraqi Kurdistan, and a relative of 2 of the deceased emerged, the House Workplace refuted their claims that the dinghy had sunk in UK waters as “completely untrue”.
On December 1, clandestine Channel danger commander O’Mahoney spoke back to a query from the United Kingdom’s Joint Committee on Human Rights, as as to if the migrants whose our bodies have been present in French waters had made misery calls to the United Kingdom government. O’Mahoney advised the committee:
We’re taking a look into that. To control your expectation, although, it is going to by no means be imaginable to mention with absolute accuracy whether or not that boat was once in UK waters [and] I can’t let you know with any simple task that the folk on that exact boat referred to as the United Kingdom government.
Thank you in large part to their grieving households tireless pursuit of the reality, on the other hand, it’s now imaginable to mention definitively that Charlie have been in UK waters – and that plenty of its passengers spoke to HM Coastguard officials.
It was once handiest after those households raised issues that the crisis had concerned the United Kingdom government that the Division for Delivery commissioned a security investigation into the incident in January 2022. A legal professional for the bereaved households recommended to me that with out the specter of criminal motion, the Division for Delivery “would likely not have done anything” – regardless of this being Britain’s worst maritime crisis for many years. In the meantime, in keeping with inquiry proof, the House Workplace is known to not have performed an inside evaluate or investigation into its position within the crisis.
16 Kurdish migrants had been a few of the other folks drowned within the Channel whilst making an attempt to pass to England on November 24 2021.
Stringer/EPA
After a irritating two years of looking ahead to the survivors and bereaved households, the Marine Injuries Investigations Department revealed its record – which each showed maximum in their accounts and substantiated their criticisms of the SAR reaction.
Quickly afterwards, the Cranston Inquiry was once introduced. In spite of no our bodies having been recovered in UK waters, it’s been run virtually like an inquest. In his ultimate record – to be revealed via the top of 2025 – Sir Ross Cranston has promised to “consider what lessons can be learned and, if appropriate, make recommendations to reduce the risk of a similar event occurring”.
A ‘crucial and unique opportunity’
HM Coastguard and Border Drive officials have many times advised the inquiry how the United Kingdom’s solution to small boat search-and-rescue has modified because the November 2021 crisis. Extra officials were employed, Border Drive has shrunk further boats to behavior rescues, data sharing has stepped forward, and cooperation with French colleagues is best. As of late, there are considerably extra rescue ships on either side of the Channel which will intrude sooner when dinghies come to be in misery, and feature for sure stored many lives.
There has additionally been large funding in drones, aeroplanes and strong shore-based cameras to cut back the danger that HM Coastguard loses “maritime domain awareness” once more if a few of its surveillance airplane are not able to fly. New generation robotically interprets coastguard officials’ messages into other languages and extracts are living GPS places and photographs from travellers’ cell gadgets.
Such investments make it not going that every other dinghy might be misplaced in the midst of the Channel after its passengers name for assist, in the best way Charlie so catastrophically was once.
Knowledge from the Refugee Council’s Deaths within the Channel: What Must Exchange.
However, other folks proceed loss of life whilst making an attempt to pass the Channel – with 2024 having been via some distance the deadliest 12 months but. No less than 69 other folks misplaced their lives, in keeping with the Refugee Council. To this point in 2025, 24 individuals are documented as useless or lacking on the UK-France border via Calais Migrant Team spirit, amid a file selection of tried crossings for the primary 1/2 of the 12 months.
Those other folks aren’t loss of life in “mass casualty incidents” similar to Charlie, which are a magnet for headlines, however as an alternative one or two at a time as “increasingly overcrowded dinghies” smash aside, and other folks fall into the ocean or are beaten within them.
Some migrants’ rights NGOs have recommended the United Kingdom’s “stop the boats” insurance policies, and Ecu efforts to disrupt the availability chain of dinghies and different apparatus utilized in crossings, has pushed such fatal overcrowding.
And with the French govt having promised to switch its laws of engagement to intercept dinghies as soon as at sea, amid reviews of French police wading into the surf to slash dinghies with knives, the NGOs concern Channel migrants are going through ever better risks.
Video: Le Monde.
However it’s also not going that the instances surrounding newer deaths within the Channel will ever be investigated as totally as Incident Charlie, if in any respect. Attorneys for the bereaved households have subsequently been prepared to focus on the Cranston Inquiry’s “crucial and unique opportunity” now not handiest to appear again and be offering solutions about one in every of Britain’s worst maritime failures in fresh many years – however to appear forwards and “prevent the further loss of life at sea”.
The survivors, households and migrants’ rights organisations who contributed their proof thus hope the inquiry’s suggestions transcend purely operational and administrative enhancements to search-and-rescue, to deal with the basic position that UK, France and Ecu border insurance policies play in why extra individuals are loss of life within the Channel, regardless of the enhancements to search-and-rescue methods and assets.
Above all, they ask why only a few individuals are in a position to trip to the United Kingdom in convenience and protection whilst others will have to make the adventure in precarious, overcrowded inflatable dinghies – and thus entrust their lives to the search-and-rescue services and products whose good fortune can by no means be assured. As Halima Mohammed Shikh’s cousin, Ali Areef, advised the inquiry:
It makes me really feel unwell to take into accounts crossing the Channel in a ferry the place others together with a member of my circle of relatives misplaced their lives as a result of there was once no different solution to pass. I can by no means take a ferry around the Channel once more.
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