ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Paris prosecutor’s office on Tuesday announced that they had identified all but one of the 27 migrants who drowned in the deadliest migrant disaster in the English Channel to date when their inflatable boat capsized while attempting to cross from France to England, with 17 Kurds among the dead.
“The commission confirmed the identity of sixteen Iraqi Kurdish individuals, including four women aged 22 to 46, one 16-year-old, one 7-year-old and ten men aged 19 to 37 as well as a 23-year-old Kurdish man from Iran,” the statement from the office read.
A boat carrying 33 migrants from different countries, including Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, capsized in the English Channel on November 24. There are only two known survivors of the disaster, including a Kurd from the Region.
“Also identified were three Ethiopians, including two women aged 22 and 25 and a 46 year old man, a 33-year-old Somali woman, four Afghan men aged between 24 and 40 and an Egyptian man aged 20,” the statement added.
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) on Sunday announced that they will return the bodies of the Kurdish migrants to the Region, although an exact date for their return is yet to be announced.
The two survivors and relatives of deceased migrants who were tracking the boat’s movement on live location have accused British authorities of ignoring repeated calls for help from the migrants as they were reportedly in trouble in British waters.
The Home Office commander in charge of stopping English Channel migrant crossings earlier this month said he could not disclose to a UK parliamentary committee whether the boat that attempted to cross the Channel on November 24 made contact with UK authorities prior to the drowning of the people on the boat.
Last week, a report in French newspaper Le Monde corroborated these claims, stating that the migrants on board the boat had called for help and, according to a judicial source, the statements made by these two survivors were confirmed by detailed telephone records extracted by the police.
According to data provided to Rudaw in October by the head of Summit (Lutka) Foundation for Refugee and Displaced Affairs Ari Jalal, in the past seven years over 633,000 people from the Kurdistan Region and Iraq have migrated abroad. Of them, over 260 died on the way.
Jalal added that in the first ten months of 2021, around 37,000 people from the Kurdistan Region and Iraq had migrated abroad.
