“France will not allow the Channel to become a cemetery,” President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday night after at least 31 migrants drowned off the French coast, including five women and a small girl.
The alarm was raised by a fisherman who saw 15 bodies floating in the Channel at about 2pm on Wednesday.
The French interior minister Gérard Darmanin said four persons suspected of involvement in the fatal attempted crossing had been arrested.
The tragedy “underscores how dangerous it is to cross the Channel in this way.
The International Organisation for Migration said it was the biggest single loss of life in the Channel in at least seven years.
The number of small vessels attempting to cross the Channel has doubled over the past three months, Philippe Dutrieux, the head of the regional maritime authority, said last week.
The British wire agency PA said more than 25,700 migrants have succeeded in crossing the Channel this year, three times more than the entire year of 2020.
Mr Dutrieux said that 31,500 migrants had set sail from the French side this year.
About 7,800 have been saved by the French, and seven drowned prior to Wednesday
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