An entire family and two men died drowned in October 2020 trying to join England. The defendants were convicted of manslaughter, endangering the life of others and helping the irregular stay in organized band.
by Julia Pascual (Dunkirk (North), Special Envoy )
nier. This is what they did during the hearing, this January 20 before the Dunkirk court (north). For more than seven hours, three Iranians appeared for organizing passages to England by boat. One of these attempts to cross, on October 27, 2020, cost the life of an entire family and two men whose bodies were not found.
Rasoul Iranejad, his wife Samira and their three children aged 8, 6 years and 18 months old arrived in the Dunkerquois coastal region at the end of September. They were sleeping alternately in camps or accommodation centers, waiting to cross the Channel. To come to Europe, they had sold their house in Iran where they feared the regime which considered Rasoul as being too close to the Kurdish peshmergas.
On the day of the crossing, the family, believing to take shelter, had gathered in the cabin of the small boat of five meters aboard which they were mounted with seventeen other people and which had to do them Reach the English coasts in an hour, depending on the promise of the smugglers. They were trapped there when barely five kilometers away from the coast, the sea formed and returned the boat designed for fishing parts on lakes.
“I heard them scream”
“I heard them scream, I tried to break the window with my foot, I also tried to go below [from the boat] but the other survivors were moving the boat and I took a blow On the head, “reported one of the fifteen survivors, auditioned after the drama. Alerted by a British sailboat, many help were quickly dispatched to the site.
Diving in the Channel this October 27 to try to find survivors, a soldier of the French Navy rose the body of Samira and that of her 6 -year -old son. He remembered during his hearing, read by the court, of the face “frozen in the horror” of the mother. The body of Artin, his youngest boy of 18 months, was drafted two months later off Norway, dressed in the same little blue combination in which his parents had photographed him for some time before their fatal attempted passage .
None of the Iranians who survived the drama was present at the hearing, not even the one who had piloted the boat and who, placed under judicial supervision, “disappeared from traffic”, in the words of the president , Caroline Vilnat. He was sentenced to two years in prison, suspected of having negotiated a cheaper passage in return for his services.
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