Days after the U.K. truck deaths, eight other migrants including four children were found suffering from light hypothermia Sunday inside a refrigerated truck that was about to travel from a French port on the ferry to Britain, judicial sources said. The migrants, who said they were Afghans, were found during a routine check at the French port of Calais in the early morning, a source said, asking not to be named. The temperature inside was just seven degrees Celsius (45 degrees Fahrenheit). The two drivers, both Romanians, have been detained, while the migrants were taken to a local hospital.
When France shut the Calais shanty town known as the Jungle in 2016, migrants seeking entry to Britain were forced to look for less safe passage up the coast in Belgium, the route taken by a truck in which 39 bodies were found this week.
In recent years, the focus of migrant efforts to reach Britain has been the French port of Calais, across the Channel from Dover, offering more than hourly ferry services and an undersea tunnel on the shortest crossing to the U.K. The migrant community in Calais grew to some 6,000 people, most of them in a shanty town dubbed the Jungle, outside Calais until French authorities emptied it in October 2016, saying it was a security and health hazard.
The discovery came after 39 people were found dead in a refrigerated truck in Britain last week, laying bare again the risks of illegal migrant routes to Europe. The Geneva-based International Organization for Migration (IOM) said it has noted a trend in the past year of increasing numbers of migrants also trying to cross to Britain in small boats. There were five drownings in the Channel this year. The 39 deaths this week brought the total number of fatalities among migrants crossing the European continent to 97, compared with 92 at the same juncture in 2018.
According to the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (FRONTEX), there’s been a 14% increase in the number of detected illegal border crossings at the main migratory routes to EU countries in September, compared to the previous month this year. Also according to FRONTEX, Tunisians and the Sudanese were the two main national groups illegally crossing European borders through the central Mediterranean, with Afghans constituting more than half the migrants detected on the Western Balkans route.
