Eurasia Press & News
French authorities have little regard for the lives of migrants at the Franco-British border.
Jumaa al-Hasan, a young Syrian man, drowned on the night between 2 and 3 March 2024 in the north of France, during an attempted police interception. An investigation by The New Arab (TNA) can reveal that, despite the proximity of officers on shore and repeated warnings from those travelling with Jumaa al-Hasan, the police did nothing to save the 27 year old. In the aftermath of his death, the fire brigade carried out only a minimal search.
A year later, the related inquiry is looking the other way. Only smugglers are being investigated, while overlooking the responsibility of the French police and the shortcomings of the emergency services.
“All he wanted was to help his family back in Syria”
Mohamed al-Mohamed al-Hasan says little, but his thoughts are clear. “All I want is to understand why the police did nothing to help my nephew Jumaa,” he told TNA, sitting in a Syrian restaurant in the UK, where he’s been living since 2016. The 50-year-old, with salt-and-pepper hair and a full beard, still has vivid memories of his nephew.
Jumaa al-Hasan was 15 years old when the first protests against Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorial regime broke out in 2011. Two years later, the Aleppo-born teenager fled the war that was sweeping the country, after losing one of his older brothers to the violence. He moved to neighbouring Lebanon for work. “All he wanted was to help his family back in Syria,” explained Mohamed.
Jumaa Al Hasan left Lebanon in 2023 and spent two years in Algeria. “He was a cheerful person, although he would spend long hours scanning the horizon and looking at the sea, thinking about all the difficulties he had to face in his exile,” recounted his uncle.
In February 2024, he paid £6,000 (around $7,600 at the time) to a smuggler to cross the Mediterranean and reach the Spanish coast. “By coming to the UK and joining me, Jumaa hoped to resume his studies,” said Mohamed. Since the news of his death, his parents, who live in Aleppo, have been devastated.
Mohamed filed a civil suit in France to find out what had really happened to Jumaa on that night in Gravelines, a commune on the country’s northern coast along the Channel.
Since Jumaa’s drowning, no court has ever investigated the police operation to intercept the migrants and the subsequent shortcomings of the rescue services. The seven key witnesses we interviewed and the recordings of telephone calls from that night prove that the police’s actions caused Jumaa’s fall into the Aa canal, and that neither the police nor the fire brigade came to his assistance.
“He had no other option, so he jumped”
On 2 March 2024, a police patrol spotted a small boat on the Aa canal between the towns of Bourbourg and Sainte-Marie-Kerque at 10pm, according to the Préfecture de Police du Nord.
“After inflating the Zodiac [inflatable boat], we boarded. We were around fifteen people on board,” recalled Bilal*, a 21 year old Syrian witness, who now lives in the United Kingdom.
The boat, followed by the police, sailed down the canal and arrived at the pontoon close to Rue de la Gare in Gravelines, a few dozen metres from the lock marking the entrance to the marina. A group of migrants on the shore, including Jumaa, were waiting for the craft to pass.
Here, the police presence intensified: in addition to a number of vehicles following the boat, more had parked on the road ahead, illuminating the bank below with their blue flashing lights. “The street was full of police cars,” recounted Bilal, Mounir, and Nasser*, three other Syrian passengers of the craft that TNA interviewed in the UK, where they currently live. All three feel a sense of injustice since that night.
Officers intervened to prevent the men and women waiting on the bank from boarding the boat. A few days after the incident, the authors of this investigation contacted the Préfecture du Nord, which represents the ministry of the interior at the local level, inquiring about the events of that night.
The Préfecture responded in writing that “around ten migrants emerged from the woods when the boat reached them. The police officers tried to prevent this group from boarding and, when faced with the hostility from the individuals, were forced to use tear gas several times. Despite this, the migrants took their places on board, most of them throwing themselves into the water beforehand.”
The “Stop the Boats” approach, promoted by former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (October 2022 – July 2024), relies on intercepting small vessels as they depart from the French coast. This strategy appears to have shaped the conduct of French police in Gravelines. Under a series of bilateral agreements, British authorities have committed hundreds of millions of euros to tighten border controls on French shores – support that has frequently translated into violent interventions at the point of embarkation.
Images regularly show the police on French beaches piercing inflatable boats with knives and making heavy use of tear gas on migrants to prevent their departures. French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau announced in February 2025 his intention to further extend the scope of the Gendarmerie’s (French military police) powers, to enable them to “board boats” within “300 metres of the shore line”. These measures are expected to be put in place as soon as July 2025, which experts fear will put the lives of migrants in further danger.
The police’s actions on the night of 2 to 3 March 2024 employed a similar degree of force: “The police came out and started chasing people, beating them with truncheons. Anyone who went near the river was sprayed with tear gas and clubbed,” said Mounir*.
Jumaa ran away from the gas, while trying to get closer to the inflatable boat. Crouching under a tree, he found himself caught in a vice between the canal on one side and the police approaching from the other. Nasser*, the person on board closest to where Jumaa was standing, told TNA that “he was too scared to jump, but at the same time, he couldn’t go back because the police were above.”
The inflatable boat was just a few meters from Jumaa, but he couldn’t descend any further because of a stretch of mud exposed by the low tide. Hesitantly, he straightened up and turned to walk back up the bank and towards the street above. It was then that he was spotted by the police. According to two witnesses, officers shone torches on the young migrant, their beams so bright that “it looked like daylight,” recalled Mounir*.
“When Jumaa tried to climb back up [the river bank]”, Nasser* told TNA, “the police started spraying him with [tear] gas. Because of this, he was forced back down [towards the water].” Nasser* insisted that the officers had used the tear gas on Jumaa while he still had his back to the Zodiac. The tear gas had been used so heavily that five of the boat passengers we interviewed recounted feeling burns to their eyes and throats.
“At that point, he probably realised he had no other option, so he jumped. He immediately sank,” said Nasser.”When he saw the police starting to descend towards him firing tear gas, he threw himself into the water,” explained Mounir. Six of our seven witnesses watched him drown.
Police, fire brigade: a series of unheeded calls for help
Immediately, migrants alerted police officers on the bank of the canal. According to three witnesses, a passenger who spoke English shouted at the officers: “A young man has just thrown himself into the water and drowned!” Mounir* recalled that some officers had asked them: “Where is the drowned person?” But as the boat resumed its journey, the police paid no further heed to the migrants’ desperate calls for help. “They were walking along the bank as we continued down the canal. They were looking at the boat, not at the person who was drowning,” continued Nasser*.
A few minutes later, the boat reached the Bassin Vauban, Gravelines’ marina, and got stuck in the mud. Several migrants decided to get off the zodiac, but were unable to move because of the mud. The police’s Prefecture Du Nord admitted that, at the time of this disembarkation, some migrants “complained that one of them had fallen into the water and sunk beneath the surface. Emergency services were called and immediately intervened”.
According to the Departmental Fire and Rescue Service’s report of that night’s events , the fire brigade was deployed at 11.19pm. Firefighters concentrated their efforts on the Bassin Vauban, dispatching divers and a boat among other efforts to pull the migrants out of the mud. However, these substantial resources were not deployed upstream, where Jumaa had drowned, despite the migrants’ pleas to do so.
Nawras, another Syrian who now lives in the UK, attests to this. He was waiting for the boat on the docks of the Bassin Vauban with a second group of migrants. “When the boat arrived at our level,” recounted the Syrian migrant, “Mounir alerted us to Jumaa’s drowning, so I gave up on boarding.” Nawras* went back up river and, on Rue de la Gare (which is located opposite the park where Jumaa tried to board the Zodiac), he came across numerous police vehicles. “Nobody seemed concerned,” Nawras* lamented, “I spoke to the policemen in English and Arabic, saying: ‘My friend is dying here!’, pointing to the canal, but nobody reacted.”
At 12:17 a.m., an hour after the start of the fire brigade’s operation, another appeal to help Jumaa was ignored. Alerted by Bilal*, who had climbed out of the boat, an NGO called Utopia 56 contacted SAMU (the emergency ambulance service), the police, and the fire department to report the drowning of a migrant called Jumaa. The recordings of the calls made throughout the night once again testify to the firefighters’ tepid response.
“We’ve recovered two, they’re not dead (…) We’ve been looking for people who’ve fallen into the water for an hour,” a firefighter voiced his frustration over the phone, while coordinating his team working in the Bassin Vauban. When the head of SAMU paramedics asked him if it was necessary to deploy the Mobile Emergency and Resuscitation Unit (SMUR) and manpower to the scene, he insisted: “No, we’ve caught two in the mud, they’re covered in shit, we’ve got them, that’s it.” Faced with the insistence of the Utopia 56 volunteer, who continued to mention the possible drowning of a migrant, the firefighter responded by casting doubts over the presence of “so-called dead” people.
The New Arab contacted the police and the Departmental Fire and Rescue Service, confronting them with these allegations about their poor conduct in the rescue operation that could have saved the life of Jumaa al-Hasan. We received no response by the time of publication.
A systematic dehumanisation of migrants
The neglect shown by authorities in the face of a life-threatening emergency reflects the entrenched dehumanisation of migrants that has become the norm on the northern French coast. This is evident in the refusal of emergency accommodation service to take in migrants; in the buses that fail to stop to let them on; and in the Calais municipality’s decision to scatter hundreds of boulders across the town center to deter their presence, while issuing bylaws that prevented NGOs from distributing food to them from 2020 to 2022.
The most striking example of the disgraceful treatment migrants receive was the shipwreck on 24 November 2021. For several hours, the occupants of a boat in distress tried to alert the Gris-Nez Regional Operational Rescue and Surveillance Center (CROSS), which is responsible for monitoring the coastline and launching rescue operations. The CROSS did not send any vessels to assist the boat, leaving 31 people to drown.
In the court hearings, the minutes of which were revealed by Le Monde, the CROSS servicemen say they didn’t take these calls seriously, as the migrants “call and cry danger when they have nothing [to fear]”, a statement reminiscent of the authorities’ reactions on the night of Jumaa’s drowning.
In contrast, witnesses told TNA of how they considered putting themselves in danger in an attempt to save or find Jumaa. “When I saw Jumaa disappear into the water, I immediately took off my jacket to dive,” explained Nasser, “but Mounir held me back and prevented me from jumping into the water to protect myself.”
A good swimmer, Nawras* noted the police’s inaction when he arrived on the scene within a quarter of an hour of Jumaa’s fall. He too thought of getting in the water to look for him, before some policemen and migrants accompanying him dissuaded him.
Shortly after half past midnight, around an hour and a half after Jumaa’s drowning, “only two policemen agreed to join me as we walked, for half an hour, the distance between the Quai Vauban and the pontoon located on Rue de la Gare,” recounted Bilal*, “they used their flashlights to light up the river, but we found no trace of Jumaa that way.”
No thorough search for the body
The last fire crews left the scene at around 1:40 a.m., according to the Departmental Fire and Rescue Service report. “A reconnaissance with the drone was carried out over the lock and the port of Gravelines as well as over the entire canal, no people in the water,” concluded the report.
Contacted by the authors of this investigation on 8 March 2024, the Dunkirk police station said its teams were alerted at around 11pm about “a so-called migrant who had fallen into the water”. But they reiterated the outcome of their search: “There was no man in the water, no disappearance.”
On 12 March 2024, a Gravelines firefighter confirmed to the authors of this investigation the absence of a thorough search for a possible deceased person. “If there was a certainty that someone was still in the water, the search would have been continued,” he explained.
Neither the filing of an incident report with the French police on March 9 by Jumaa’s uncle, who had come from the UK for this purpose, nor the referral of the case to the Dunkirk public prosecutor by a group of NGOs on 12 March resulted in a thorough search operation of the Aa canal for Jumaa’s body.
On the contrary, shortly after Jumaa’s drowning in March 2024, a few kilometres away, in the village of Pitgam, the disappearance of a local resident prompted the opening of a thorough investigation. The Gendarmerie organised a search lasting several days and a public appeal for witnesses was issued. The story had a tragic outcome though, as the lifeless body of the 52-year-old woman was discovered in the Aa canal ten days later.
Blame the smugglers
It was not until 8am on March 19, 16 days later, that Jumaa’s body was discovered by chance in the Aa canal by a passer-by. On the same day, Charlotte Huet, the Dunkirk public prosecutor, opened an investigation into the cause of his death. She explained in an email that the investigation would have two objectives: “The first will be to verify the identity of the deceased […] the second will be to determine the circumstances of his death.” If the first objective was swiftly met (Jumaa was carrying his identity documents), the second objective will be bogged down in a judicial machine intent on pursuing smugglers.
In November, the Dunkirk public prosecutor’s office told The New Arab that it was transferring the case to the Specialised Inter-regional Court (JIRS) in Lille, which is dedicated to investigating smuggling networks. The case was then appended to a pre-existing sprawling file, in which some twenty people were under investigation. Antoine Chaudey, counsel for Jumaa’s uncle, told TNA that in this file there was “nothing in particular” pointing to the police’s responsibility for the young Syrian’s death.
The main focus of the file is those who have allegedly worked for a large-scale network smuggling people from France to the UK. In this context, deaths which occur during attempted crossings, as in the case of Jumaa, serve above all to increase the charges against the accused. They find themselves charged with one (or more) charges of manslaughter(s) or endangering others, in addition to the offences of aiding the illegal entry, movement and residence of a foreigner in France.
So, who are these “smugglers”? This category is quite broad. While the heads of criminal networks are difficult for the police and the justice system to reach, convictions often affect migrants who facilitate part of their own journey. “The line between smugglers and candidates for passage is often extremely thin,” confirmed Chaudey, the lawyer of Jumaa’s uncle. Many services can be provided in exchange for a reduction of the trip’s price, such as the delivery of life jackets, the referral of candidates for border crossing, and the preparation and steering of the boat.
In the UK, Ibrahima Bah, a Senegalese young man, was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for manslaughter in February 2024. His crime: having piloted a boat which sank in the English Channel in December 2022, causing the drowning of at least four people. The young man had accepted this role in exchange for a free passage, before changing his mind about boarding the boat in view of the danger involved. Threatened by the organisers on the beach, he finally took the helm.
“It hurts me to see him considered a smuggler, when he’s someone who left a difficult situation of poverty to take care of his family, putting his life at risk. Some ill-intentioned people forced him to drive the boat, and he’s considered guilty,” lamented his sister, Hassanatou Bah, in an interview with TNA.
On the French side, justice follows the same rationale. A migrant considered to be the driver of a boat that sank on 12 August 2023, causing six deaths and two disappearances, according to our own investigative work, has been waiting for his trial in a prison close to Paris for nearly two years.
Small boat captains, “more and more often migrants recruited by smugglers, are the first responsible for shipwrecks. Therefore the first responsible for the offence”, explained the Saint-Omer prosecutor, Mehdi Benbouzid, in an interview he gave in 2024 to the authors of this investigation. As soon as there is a shipwreck with victims, “an investigation is systematically opened: because if we don’t have our hands on someone who would have committed aid to illegal entry and residence (AESI), we have in any case someone who is responsible for involuntary manslaughter: the helmsman, the smuggler,” concluded the prosecutor.
But according to a report issued in 2022 by the NGO network PICUM (Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants), the prosecution of migrants contravenes “articles 5 and 16 of the UN Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants, which prohibit the use of anti-smuggling legislation against the migrants themselves”.
In France, migrants are paying the price of a legislative tightening, justified by the fight against so-called “smuggling networks”. The immigration law passed in January 2024 now enables the justice system to punish people accused of being smugglers much more severely.
“Before,” noted Antoine Chaudey, “people were indicted for ‘aiding illegal entry or residence’, we were on correctional proceedings [which handle mid-level crimes].” From now on, he continued, the accumulation of two aggravating circumstances – organised crime and exposure of a foreigner to a risk of death or injury – is considered a crime punishable by 20 years’ imprisonment and 1.5 million euro ($1.7 million) fine.
According to the lawyer, switching from correctional to criminal proceedings drastically lengthens the period of detention before a possible trial, even though these are migrants who have performed a one-off service. “Unfortunately, we can see that, in reality, the objective is perhaps more to aggravate the repression of those prosecuted, than to determine the exact circumstances of the death of the people, with an objective of reparation, appeasement of society, and manifestation of the truth for the deceased and their loved ones,” concluded Chaudey.
