INTERNACIONAL
Another migrant boat spotted on English Channel day after mass-casualty wreck
A day after 12 migrants died when their small inflatable ripped apart on a failed effort to cross the English Channel, several dozen others made another crossing attempt on a crowded vessel from northern France on Wednesday, as French patrol boats watched it labor through the seas.
That migrants were prepared to risk their lives so soon after a dozen others lost theirs trying to cross the busy waterway from France to Britain underscored the magnitude of the problem for the French and U.K. governments. It was the deadliest accident involving a migrant boat in the English Channel this year.
The mayor of Wimereux, a French coastal town where Associated Press journalists filmed the crowded inflatable boat on Wednesday, pleaded for French and British officials to do more to limit the number of migrants attempting the often perilous journey.
«Unfortunately, every day is like this for us. The smugglers — a criminal network — continue with insistence to send people to their deaths in the channel. It really is unacceptable, scandalous. And it is high time that a lasting solution is found with Britain,» Mayor Jean-Luc Dubaële said by phone.
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«Let’s ask ourselves the question: Why do they want to go to Britain? Because something is drawing them there,» he said. «They can ask for asylum in France. (But) none ask for the right to asylum in France. They all want to go to Britain. So it is high time that we sit around a table with the new British government.»
Cross-Channel migration was a key focus in the U.K. general election in July, which the Labour Party won resoundingly to make its leader, Keir Starmer, the new prime minister.
A French prosecutor investigating Tuesday’s sinking, Guirec Le Bras, said 10 of the 12 dead were women and six of the victims were minors. Many appeared to be Eritrean, he said. The inflatable boat sank about 3 miles off the French coast, he said. Maritime authorities said many aboard didn’t have life vests.
Fishermen who recovered some of the dead said they were moved to tears.
«The bodies of two women were very young. That hurt me. I cried all day. I couldn’t stop,» said 53-year-old Samba Sy Ndiaye, who works aboard the Murex, one of two fishing boats that assisted the French rescue effort.
Another crew member, Axel Baheu, said the body of one young woman – he guessed she was between 15 and 20 – had a telephone in a waterproof pouch around her neck. It started to ring as he was pulling her out of the water and checking for a pulse, he said.
«That was hard because you know full well that no one will ever answer,» Baheu said.
His father, Jean Marie Baheu, said he saw another heavily laden migrant boat set off Wednesday in front of his house.
«When the weather is good and there’s no wind, there are departures every day,» he said. «At the beginning, you’d see 20, 30 people. Now, it’s minimum 70, 80.»
A boat thought to be with migrants is escorted by a vessel from the French Gendarmerie Nationale off the Wimereux beach, France, Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024. A boat carrying migrants ripped apart in the English Channel as they attempted to reach Britain from northern France on Tuesday, plunging dozens into the treacherous waterway and leaving 12 dead, authorities said. (AP Photo/Nicolas Garriga)
The inflatable boat the AP saw and filmed on Wednesday was carrying migrants, French maritime authorities confirmed. AP journalists estimated that 40 to 50 people were aboard.
Many wore life preservers. A patrol boat flying a French flag approached the inflatable at one point and the crew tossed more life vests — about half a dozen — to the migrants.
The English Channel’s gray seas were comparatively calm, with small waves lapping the beach as people walked dogs on the sand.
Still, the inflatable appeared to make slow headway. Even though journalists filmed it for more than two hours, it remained clearly visible from shore, with the patrol vessel buzzing around it and a larger one shadowing it from farther away.
The French maritime agency that oversees that stretch of sea said the boats were monitoring the inflatable in case it ran into difficulty or people aboard requested assistance.
In a statement to the AP, the agency said that although maritime law forbids the use at sea of makeshift inflatables, it’s too dangerous to force them back to shore when the boats are heavily laden.
«It’s difficult to achieve with more than 50 people on board who are vehemently refusing to be rescued. The main risk is a stampede on board and then a capsizing, these boats being neither stable nor reliable. The risk of loss of human life being too high for an intervention under duress, the choice is made to prioritize the protection of the people on board and by simply monitoring from a distance the navigation capabilities of these boats,» the statement said.
«It is therefore more a question of ethics than of blind application of the law,» it added.
By the U.K. government’s count, at least 21,720 migrants have managed to cross the English Channel so far this year. That’s 3% more than at the same stage last year, but 19% lower than during the same period in 2022.
The boat that ripped apart on Tuesday, plunging 65 people into the sea, was one of several crossing attempts that day. British authorities said at least 317 migrants succeeded, arriving aboard five boats.
One of the first measures the new U.K. government immediately enacted was to scrap the previous Conservative government’s plan to send some migrants arriving in small boats to Rwanda rather than being allowed to seek asylum in Britain. Human rights groups criticized the plan.
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Starmer called the plan a «gimmick» and wouldn’t act as a deterrent. Instead, his government has opted to divert some of the money saved from ditching the program into setting up a strengthened border force to «smash» the criminal gangs behind the small-boat arrivals.
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda has once again called on the U.S. to place nuclear weapons within its borders in a show of deterrence to Russia’s continued aggression just over the border in Ukraine.
A similar request was apparently made to the Biden administration in 2022, which was never agreed to, but Duda has not given up on the idea. This time he addressed his appeal to the Trump administration during an interview with the Financial Times that was published Thursday.
«Russia did not even hesitate when they were relocating their nuclear weapons into Belarus,» Duda told the Financial Times in reference to actions Russia took beginning in 2023, a year after it invaded Ukraine. «They didn’t ask anyone’s permission.»
The White House did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s questions about where President Donald Trump stands when it comes to this form of deterrence.
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President Andrzej Duda speaks during the Polish parliament meeting in Warsaw on March 7, 2025. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The Trump administration this week took steps to try and bring about an end to the war in Ukraine, which has been raging for more than three years following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
While Ukraine has agreed to the U.S.’s initial 30-day ceasefire contingent on Russia’s acceptance of the terms, Moscow has not, and it is unlikely that the Trump administration would take steps to jeopardize those negotiations by agreeing to put U.S. nukes in Poland – which shares a border with Russia and could be viewed as a threat by the Kremlin.
But Duda’s advisor on international affairs, Wojciech Kolarski, echoed the Polish president’s plea and, in a Thursday interview with Poland’s RMF FM radio, argued that as a NATO member who shares a border with Russia’s Kaliningrad region, as well as Ukraine and Belarus, the steps were important for Warsaw’s security.
Aerial view taken on Nov. 17, 2022 shows the site where a missile strike killed two men in the eastern Poland village of Przewodow, near the border with war-ravaged Ukraine on Nov. 15, 2022. (Wojtek Radwanski, Damien Simonart/AFP via Getty Images)
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But should the U.S. again refuse Poland’s request, there is another nuclear-armed nation in the NATO alliance that may be willing to assist in «nuclear sharing.»
Amid mounting concern in the European Union that the U.S. could withdraw forces from the bloc or become an unreliable defense partner in countering Russia, French President Emmanuel Macron opened discussions on a strategy that could help extend its nuclear deterrence to other EU nations.
French President Emmanuel Macron meets with President Donald Trump. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
While the specifics of that strategy remain unclear, including whether France has proposed actually dispersing nuclear arms to other nations, Poland has reportedly been in talks with France about the issue.
Russia has already called France’s strategy to re-evaluate its extension of nuclear deterrence «extremely confrontational.»
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Despite Moscow’s objections, France’s defense concept is far from new as the U.S. deterrence umbrella during the Cold War was intended to ensure NATO allies would be protected under America’s nuclear power in case of a direct threat by another nuclear-armed nation, like Russia, China or North Korea.
While France is the EU’s only nuclear power, it has the third-largest nuclear stockpile when it comes to nuclear-armed nations in NATO, which also includes the U.S. and the U.K.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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