Two children were among a group of 18 Albanians and two British people rescued from the Channel on Saturday night.
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Trevor Bunney, who was part of the RNLI lifeboat rescue team, said the people they rescued were “a bit dishevelled, [had] obviously been at sea a long time and not in the best of conditions”.
They were traveling in a rigid-hulled inflatable boat and it took rescuers several hours to locate the small craft.
Calais coastguard organisation SNSM assisted in the operation, according to its president Bernard Barron.
The UN says 100 people are missing from a boat which capsized on Wednesday and 550 from a vessel that tipped over on Thursday.
‘They had called their families, who then alerted the authorities and rescue missions were triggered on both sides of the Channel.
Patry said it is possible that migrants will die trying to cross the Channel, adding that helicopters and ships are among the means authorities uses to try to identify the boats in order to keep migrants safe.
The Home Office said that Mark Stribling, 35, and Robert Stilwell, 33, appeared at Medway Magistrate’s Court and will be kept in custody until the next court hearing on June 27.
The group were handed over to the UK Border Force and taken to Dover.
She said anecdotal evidence suggested Britain’s coasts were facing the biggest ever influx of people smugglers. We need to get a grip on this.
High winds, strong currents, heavy traffic and low water temperatures all make the Channel a treacherous stretch of water.
A recent refugee-swap deal between the European Union and Turkey has dramatically slowed the flow of boats crossing the Mediterranean, and now there’s concern migrants will make longer overland journeys to France and cross the English Channel, a busy shipping route that poses serious risks to the small dinghies used by refugees.
Britain has only three cutters actively patrolling its coastline, which has hundreds of small ports with accessible harbors.
Sunday’s incident comes after 17 men, thought to be Albanian migrants, were detained when a catamaran arrived at Chichester Marina in West Sussex on Tuesday, along with a 55-year-old British man wanted on suspicion of murder in Spain.
But the National Crime Agency told CNN that people crossing the channel was nothing new, with numerous incidents of vessels being used to smuggle people and being intercepted.
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“The matter has been passed to Home Office Immigration Enforcement”.
