A migrant survivor of a shooting at a French refugee camp said he saw his friends murdered by the “angel of death”.
Matin, a 25-year-old Kurdish migrant, said “a guy came with a shotgun and showered us with bullets” during the attack on Saturday.
A 22-year-old French gunman shot dead two migrants and two security guards at the camp in Loon-Plage, near Dunkirk, with another victim targeted in a nearby town.
“Initially, we thought he would fire in the air and then he loaded the gun and aimed at us. We saw Azrael [the Islamic Angel of Death],” Matin told Sky News.
The two victims, named Hamid and Hadi, were walking along with their two friends, Rashad and Matin, when the assailant opened fire.
The group, all aged around 25, had just been rescued from the English Channel by French police after their dinghy collapsed on the way to Britain.
He said the group was rescued after falling into the sea without life jackets and had returned to land to get dry clothes from a charity as they were “dying of cold”.
“The gunman came and, all of sudden, drew a shotgun. We saw death with our own eyes. It was God’s will that we survived. In one day, we saw death twice,” he said.
He said the gunman fired around 15 bullets and his friend Hamid was hit in the head as he and Rashad managed to hide.
A 22-year-old man claiming to be the assassin handed himself to the nearby Ghyvelde police station at 5pm local time on Saturday. Authorities found three more weapons in the suspect’s car, French media reported.
It was not immediately clear what the motives were for the shootings. Refugees have been camping in the area for years, predominantly “Kurdish or Afghan and including many families with small children”, according to the charity Care4Calais,
Loon-Plage is home to refugee camps and is near to Calais and the Strait of Dover, the closest point between England and France where thousands of migrants cross the Channel from mainland Europe each year.
