According to the prefecture, a “hundred migrants” were trying to take the sea to join England.
Mo12345lemonde with AFP
About fifteen children, aged 1 to 16, who were part of a group of migrants trying the crossing towards England, were rescued on the night of Thursday December 8 to Friday 9 on a beach in the Pas-de-Calais.
“These 15 children, in a state of hypothermia, were taken care of by the firefighters” and transported to the hospital, it is specified in the press release. “Their vital prognosis is not engaged.” A 5-year-old girl was however “left the water and then revived by a gendarme on the beach”, underlines the prefecture of Pas-de-Calais.
These children were rescued by the gendarmes who “did not hesitate to help them by putting themselves in the water to save them” while they were positioned in surveillance on Camiers beach, near Touquet . “A hundred migrants” tried to take the sea from this beach during the night, the prefecture specifies. Among them, thirty-seven have been sheltered in a gym where they “benefited from dry clothes”.
The maritime route between France and England is one of the most borrowed in the world, “with more than four hundred commercial vessels which pass there by day and the weather conditions are often difficult there”, specifies the prefecture Maritime of the Manche and the North Sea (Premar).
However, always more exiles try the crossing. More than 40,000 migrants arrived in the United Kingdom after crossing the Channel aboard small boats in 2022, a record. On November 24, 2021, twenty-seven migrants had died in the sinking of their boat off Calais, the worst drama recorded in the English Channel.