On Monday (June 16), a total of nine men went on trial in northern France, suspected of operating smuggling operations across the Channel. The men are being charged with involuntary manslaughter after one of the boats they are accused of being involved with left northern France on December 14, 2022, and ended in a shipwreck, in which four people died and four people went missing.

Rescuers saved 39 people from the ship after it capsized a few kilometers off the English coast. Only one of the bodies was identified, an Afghan man. On board the boat, reports the French newspaper Le Monde, were migrants from Afghanistan, Albania, India and Senegal. There were at least eight minors on board the boat, according to the French news channel France Bleu. The passengers said they paid between 1,500 and 4,000 euros a head to be on board.

The eight suspects who are in detention include Kurdish and Afghan nationals between the ages of 22 and 40, reports the French news agency Agence France Presse (AFP). They are being tried in the French city of Lille, not too far from the French coast where most of the boats depart for the United Kingdom.

A tenth suspect, currently detained in Belgium, is scheduled to be involved in a separate trial at a later date, as reported by Le Monde.

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Prosecutors believe boat was damaged before it set off

The suspected smugglers are believed to have picked up the migrants to board the ship at the camp in Loon Plage and then transported them to Ambleteuse.

The migrants were then expected to inflate their own boat. The 7.7-meter-long boat, 2.7 meters wide, was then loaded up. Around a quarter of those on board did not have a life jacket.

According to evidence gathered by investigators, several people on board the boat reported hearing a "loud bang that sounded like the boat had been punctured before the departure," reported Le Monde.

The suspected smugglers allegedly told the passengers not to worry, and that the boat was the only one available for the crossing.

About one to two hours into the crossing, the boat began filling with water and some of the passengers stood up to get the attention of a nearby ship. It was perhaps this pressure that then collapsed the hull of the boat, which burst under the weight of the water. All of the passengers then fell into the sea.

The magistrate told the court that the water temperatures that night (thought to have been around ten degrees) meant that anyone falling in could risk hypothermia within four minutes of exposure. The sea was relatively rough, and not everyone had life jackets. Those who died were not wearing any, reported AFP.

Those rescued were picked up by British and French ships.

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Investigators seek to establish roles and levels of involvement

Investigators told the French press that some of those on trial are suspected of recruiting the smugglers and organizing the logistics of the crossing. Others are accused of heading up the operation at the migrant camp in Loon Plage, not far from the city of Dunkirk.

Prosecutors in the trial will be seeking to establish which role each suspect may have played. According to France Bleu, the suspects have not, or only partially, pleaded guilty, and have sought to minimize their alleged roles in the operation.

The prosecutors have said that they believe that three of the suspects, including the person who is still on the run, are thought to have formed the heads of the suspected gang. Two brothers are accused of looking after the finances and collecting the money from those on board.

Some of those on trial said that they were forced to take part in the smuggling activities. One of the lawyers representing one of those, Dorothée Assaga, told France Bleu that "he doesn’t really believe himself to be a smuggler, but he has admitted that he was forced to help. He was threatened with a weapon. My client was a migrant himself and he helped the gang so that he could get to Great Britain," Assaga is reported to have said.

One Senegalese migrant who was allegedly steering the boat was already arrested and jailed in the UK. He was reported to have been a minor and inexperienced.

Many, often young, migrants offer to pilot boats in return for a free or cheaper passage. In 2021, InfoMigrants spoke with teenage boys outside Calais who explained that they hoped to get a cheap passage if they offered to drive the boat. They did not seem to be aware that if they did arrive, they would risk going to prison, accused of being part of the smuggling gangs, and could potentially also be held liable for any deaths on board during the voyage.

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Previous trials: 'Merchants of death'

In November 2024, 18 out of 33 alleged members of a Kurdish smuggling gang were convicted of smuggling migrants across the Channel between 2020 and 2022 in northern France. Most of them were reported to be Iraqi Kurds. A prosecutor during that trial called the suspects "merchants of death," reported the BBC at the time.

Julie Carros, the lead prosecutor, described the case as "tentacle-like," reported the BBC in October 2024, as she described how the gang had allegedly repeatedly overloaded small boats, sometimes cramming up to 15 times more people on board than the boats are designed to carry.

Since then, the number of people arriving on boats has in some cases increased still further. At the weekend, 52 people arrived on one boat in the UK, according to British government data. Photos and videos of migrants boarding the boats on the French coasts also depict the attempts of even more people trying to jump on board in sometimes waist-height water, or even deeper.

Several migrants have died just meters from the shore after being crushed to death by the number of people trying to jump on board.

The gang convicted in 2024 was accused of controlling the "lion’s share of all Channel crossings from the French coast," with a network reaching across the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany and sometimes as far away as Turkey and through the Balkan states.

Since then, the number of migrants crossing the Channel has only increased. Since the beginning of this year to mid-June, more than 16,000 migrants have crossed the Channel successfully. Thousands more wait in the Calais and Dunkirk areas in the hope of crossing.

The Channel crossing is one of the busiest waterways in the world, and even when the seas and weather appear calm on shore, currents, boat traffic and sudden weather changes, as well as cool water temperatures, can make it difficult to survive in the water for very long at all.

The French authorities regularly warn that wind speeds and waves in the Channel are high for more than 120 days a year. At least 15 migrants are reported to have died since the beginning of the year attempting to cross the Channel on small boats.

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