'He held a gun to my head': savage stories of Channel people-smuggling
When one Kurdish Iraqi man faced rough seas on the night of his planned 20-mile boat journey to Britain, the non-swimmer refused to get in. “Nobody wants to die the sea way,” he said.
Related: Refugees tell of brutality as people-smuggling across Channel booms
But the people-smuggler who had charged him £3,000 was having none of it – he was running a business and needed all his boats to be full. So he held a gun to the man’s head and forced him to board the boat before it left Dunkirk.
The experience, as described by the refugee who fled persecution in his home country and arrived – safely – in the UK in April, is one of many showing increasingly brutal smuggling tactics as small boat crossings surge.
The man is currently being held by the Home Office in an immigration detention centre. “I wanted to try to reach the UK by lorry but because of Covid lockdown it was much harder than before to hide in a lorry,” he told the Guardian.
“Even though it is much more dangerous, I had no choice but to travel by sea. I found a smuggler who charged me £3,000. When it came to boarding the boat I didn’t want to get in because the sea was very rough that night and I cannot swim. I was very afraid. Nobody wants to die the sea way.
“I told the smuggler I was not going to get into the boat but he pulled out a gun and held it to my head. He spoke my language and said: ‘There is no way back. You have to get in. You are a bastard. You are a motherfucker.’
“The smugglers do a lot of bad things to people. I have heard they sometimes force women on the boats to have sex with them. We are victimised by these people but what can we do?”
He said the ship drifted in the middle of the Channel for seven hours before being picked up by a larger boat. He and the six others were taken to the Dover shore.
A second man, 22, from Sudan, clubbed together with two others he met in Calais to buy a kayak for €250 to try to avoid the clutches of the smugglers. “We paddled for 12 hours,” he said.
“Eventually we were rescued by the British coastguard. The journey made me feel so ill. I was vomiting and I couldn’t walk or talk. I am happy that I reached the UK but I have been through so much in Sudan, in Libya and crossing the Mediterranean that I feel I have lost my mind. I hope that things will change so that we all have equal rights. If there is no humanity, there is no life.”
