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The lives of more than 30 people who drowned in a small boat crossing in the Channel could have been saved if the French coastguard had responded to a distress call, a damning report has found.
At least 27 people died when the overcrowded boat started taking on water around four hours into the journey to the UK on 24 November 2021, in the worst maritime disaster in the Channel for over 30 years. Four people are still missing but presumed dead, and two people survived the tragedy.
Sir Ross Cranston, who led the inquiry into the incident, concluded on Thursday that failings by both the UK and France contributed to the scale of the deaths.
He found that deaths were caused by the unsafe vessel provided by the people smugglers who organised the crossing, as well as French maritime authorities failing to respond when a Mayday relay was issued. The HM Coastguard search and rescue was also called off too early.
Sir Ross also said the rescue effort was hampered by a “widely held belief” within HM Coastguard that small-boat callers were exaggerating the danger they were in to be rescued, leading to an underestimation of the emergency.
After the boat started taking on water, all those on board had entered the Channel within 15 minutes of the last distress call at 3:17am, and desperate survivors were left clinging to the wreck and treading water.
Expert evidence found that many victims lived for several hours after entering the water, with some likely to be alive at 7am when the sun was rising and a smaller number still alive until the early afternoon.
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Sir Ross said that the failure of the French warship, the Flamant, to respond to a Mayday call sent out by the UK coastguard at 2:27am on 24 November was “striking”. The Flamant, which was used by the French coastguard, was about 15 minutes away from the unfolding tragedy but failed to take action – an omission now under investigation by the French authorities.
In his conclusions from the inquiry, Sir Ross wrote: “Given its proximity to [the incident] at the time of the Mayday relay, and that the small boat was intact at the time, if the Flamant had attended [the incident], many more, and possibly all, lives of those on board would have been saved”.
The crew of the Flamant have denied receiving the Mayday broadcast, but records from HM coastguard seem to show that the Flamant was communicating with another vessel, MRCC Gris-Nez, on VHF Channel 16 at the time. This was the same channel used to issue the Mayday distress call.
HM Coastguard told the inquiry that it had made MRCC Gris-Nez aware of the distress call at 2:42am, with Sir Ross writing: “It is for the French authorities to determine how the Flamant could not have been aware of the Mayday relay broadcast, if that was the case”.
The coastguard also mistakenly believed that the stricken small boat had been rescued after confusing it with another vessel, and called off the search too early. The inquiry concluded that if the search operations had continued, lives could have been saved.
The UK coastguard only realised the truth of the tragedy when they were notified by the French at 12:57 that a fishing vessel had discovered bodies in the water.
In staggering testimony to the inquiry, one of the two survivors, Issa Mohamed Omar, spoke of how he held on to the collapsed boat until the sun came up and made the decision to try to swim to safety. He estimated that he was in the water for around 10 hours before a French woman, out fishing with her family, saw him, jumped in the water and pulled him out.
Speaking about the moment the flimsy boat collapsed, Issa Mohamed Omar recalled: “The screaming when the boat tipped, and people fell in the water was deafening. I have never heard anything as desperate as this. I was not thinking about whether we were going to be rescued anymore; it was all about how to stay alive. It was dark, and I could not really see. It was extremely cold, and the sea was rough.”
Those who died in the tragedy included 46-year-old mother Kazhal Ahmed Khidir Al-Jammoor, from Kurdistan, Iraq, and her three children Hadiya, 22, Mubin, 16, and Hasti, 7.
Maryam Noori Mohammedameen, a young girl in her 20s who wanted to study engineering, was also killed. Originally from Kurdistan, she had planned to travel to the UK to join her fiancé. Her father told the inquiry that seeing her named as a victim on the news was “the darkest moment of my life, and the saddest day of all our lives”.
Her father, Noori Mohammedameen Hassan, said he considered both the UK and France responsible for her death, saying: “They were called, but no one went to help my daughter and those in the boat with her”.
The majority of the people on the small boat were from the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and there were also Somalis, Ethiopians, Afghans, Egyptians, one Iranian and one person believed to be Vietnamese.
The UK coastguard also failed to gather crucial geolocation information from the sinking boat, missing location positions sent via WhatsApp by those onboard.
A Border Force cutter, HM Valiant, also took two hours to arrive on the scene, and was not given relevant information to help identify where the boat was. They were also not told that there were people in the water, leading the commander of the Valiant to not understand that there was an emergency.
Sir Ross concluded that systemic failures in the UK coastguard contributed to the tragedy. He said that the belief that migrants would exaggerate their condition “when coupled with the extreme pressure on HM coastguard staff handling small boat search and rescue, an over-reliance on inexperienced personnel, the shortcomings in remote working, and an absence of effective supervision, explains why it was possible for HM coastguard to believe that the incident was resolved when it had not”.
