Horrific way Channel people smugglers treat refugees who can't pay for crossing

Poorer refugees who cannot pay people- are being forced at gunpoint to steer flimsy death-trap dinghies across the Channel.

Some in northern , often funded by family, can pay thousands of pounds to smuggler gangs to be boat passengers. But others, usually Africans, have no money and are told the only way they can cross to Britain is to steer. One man at a camp in Loon-Plage, near Dunkirk, told us: “We cannot pay, so we’re told with a gun pointed at us to drive the boat. I don’t know how to drive a boat, I do not want to kill people. The British government needs to look at this. We are not criminals.”

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Clare Moseley, founder of the Care4Calais charity, said: “The policy of imprisoning boat drivers is unjust. We repeatedly see refugees who have no money being pressurised into driving. The government is therefore punishing victims of war.”

Last year two African men were jailed in the UK for piloting boats. Ibrahima Bah, from Senegal, got nine years and six months for manslaughter after four refugees drowned from a boat he steered in December 2022. He said he was threatened with death and assaulted after trying in vain to avoid driving because the boat looked so small.

Also last year, Choul Phan Maker, 31, from South Sudan, was jailed for 20 months for piloting a Channel boat packed with 52 people. Even those at refugee camps with money might not get as far as a boat

.

Sources at Loon-Plage said smugglers can take cash for a crossing, then put a gun to the passengers’ faces and bar them from the boat. Sir wants smuggling gangs to be treated like terrorists.

Here at Loon-Plage are asylum seekers including journalists and nurses who are all asking the Prime Minister for a chance in Britain. Fathi Adir Muhamed, 24, shows us his media card as a reporter in war-torn Ethiopia.

“I consistently criticised the government for neglecting social matters. I endured numerous violations, including being held in prison without trial,” he says.

In a plea to the UK, he said: “Please help me. I can show you the scars of the abuses the military inflicted on me, without any legal justification.”

John, in his 20s, fled the hell of South Sudan’s civil war and was seized in Libya en route to Europe. He spent 11 months in notorious Al-Maya detention centre, near Tripoli, where he was beaten with iron rods, tortured and saw many friends killed.

“I was a nurse, that’s what I want to do with my life,” he says. “My father has told me since I was a child that London is a good place and that one day I will go there.”

Ms Moseley says: “There is no legal way for refugees near Calais to claim asylum in the UK, despite the fact 80% are eligible. They have no way to get here other than by risking their lives in small boats.”

At the camp, photographer Tim Merry and I are monitored by two masked “connectors”, who tout smuggling services. They move refugees from camps to holding spots, where they are picked up by smugglers who take them to the shore through woodland and along train tracks.

They have a shed where they keep passengers’ money and every few days gang bosses come to collect it. They earn around €5,000 (£4,275) in commission for every boat filled.

We say we are telling refugees’ stories and ask what theirs is. One replies in broken English: “It is very dangerous for us to speak.”

I ask if he means it is dangerous for everybody in the camp to speak or for him specifically. “Everyone,” he says, before adding: “I am passenger.”

I ask if he is truly a passenger or something else. His eyes narrow. “Go,” he says, gesturing with his head. They are armed, we understand, and not afraid to use their pistols.