Nine men accused of running a migrant-smuggling ring linked to a 2023 Channel capsizing that killed seven people went on trial in Paris on Tuesday, in the latest case targeting such networks between France and the UK.
Two Iraqis, six Afghans, and one Sudanese national are facing varying charges, notably involuntary manslaughter and criminal conspiracy for illegal immigration.
A tenth man from Sudan was a minor at the time of the tragedy and is being referred to a juvenile court.
Eight of the accused, aged 23 to 45, appeared in court on Tuesday wearing headphones to follow a translation of the proceedings, which opened with the names of the 65 people aboard the overloaded boat.
The ninth is still subject to an arrest warrant and was absent from the courtroom.
The trial will determine the individual degrees of responsibility of the defendants for the death of seven people as they crossed the busy shipping lane in a small boat.
The passengers, all of them Afghan, were not wearing life jackets.
Six bodies were recovered from the water, while another was later found on a beach in the Netherlands. The survivors were rescued by French and British maritime services.
“It was panic,” recalled Sudanese national Ibrahim A, who denies steering the vessel and who was the first defendant to give evidence.
“I didn’t know how to swim, I clung to the emerged part of the boat,” he recounted.
“I went back up… I cried all the tears in my body. I almost gave up as I was fleeing death,” added Ibrahim, saying he fled into exile to escape violence in his native Darfur.
“Your situation is different from that of the other defendants, in that you are not considered a smuggler. You were a client and almost lost your life,” the court president assured him, while explaining he had participated in the “failure” of the crossing.
– Better to die than live –
“You are saying that it was better to die than to stay alive,” said Ibrahim, who had landed illegally on the Italian island of Lampedusa just days before the tragedy, bursting into tears as he spoke.
“He is not a smuggler and, on the contrary, the fact he stands accused of being part of this network is a means for the judicial authorities to criminalise exile,” his lawyer, Raphael Kempf, told AFP.
The trial will also examine the smuggling networks behind the perilous crossings that are at the heart of regular tensions between Paris and London.
Britain has signed agreements with France and other nations aimed at tackling the surge in recent years of irregular migration to the country, including targeting the smuggling gangs.
The investigation into the 2023 incident revealed “an organised and structured system” for irregular migration to Britain operating in France and Germany, according to the investigative judges’ order referring the case to the criminal court.
With the coordination of several European countries, investigators uncovered a network “led by the Iraqi-Kurdish community” based in Germany, which handled logistics, while an “Afghan branch” was responsible for recruiting migrants.
France has tried similar cases as the crossings persist, despite the dangers and authorities’ deterrents.
In June, a court in the northern city of Lille sentenced seven Afghans and two Iraqi Kurds to seven to eight years in prison after a boat transporting migrants from France to Britain capsized in 2022, killing eight people.
No one has been tried in the deadliest recent tragedy on the migration route across the Channel in 2021 that killed 27 people.
The trial starting Tuesday is expected to last until November 18.
sha/sw-ekf/ah/cw/phz