Four people have died and a fifth is in critical condition after trying to reach the UK from northern France despite freezing temperatures, the French maritime authority said.
The victims were part of a group of more than 70 people attempting to board boats off the seaside resort of Wimereux at about 2 am local time (0100 GMT) on Sunday, according to local media reports.
Local authorities say the four dead were from Iraq and Syria.
Four bodies were discovered in or near the water, and one person who is believed to have suffered a cardiac arrest was transported to Boulogne hospital.
Seventy-two migrants were rescued with 20 suffering advanced hypothermia, including two young children and one pregnant woman taken for urgent care in Boulogne.
“At this stage, we regret four migrants have died and one has been transferred to hospital in Boulogne-sur-Mer,” said the maritime prefecture for the Channel region in northern France.
She added that the incident took place at about 2am when a boat left the beach and people “found themselves in difficulty at sea [attempting] to reach the boat”.
Rescuers “identified inanimate and unconscious people in the water”, the maritime prefecture told local reporters. A tugboat patrolling the coast went to the rescue and found the bodies, the first reported migrant deaths in the Channel since 15 December.
A spokesperson for the humanitarian organisation Utopia 56 said: “We cannot imagine the level of pain and suffering created by these situations. Why do we let people die when we could actually build solutions, why [are] political responsibilities are never pointed at?
“We should look outside and imagine what people are going through, be empathic, and build pragmatic solutions now! Otherwise, this situation will continue, and our ground humanity values will drown with them.”
Temperatures were between 1 and 4 degrees on Saturday.
The region around Calais, the jumping-off point for the shortest crossing to England, has long been a magnet for migrants. More than two decades after the closure of a Red Cross centre in Sangatte, hundreds of people still live in tents and makeshift shelters near Calais and Dunkirk, hoping for a chance to make the crossing hidden in a truck or onboard a small boat.
The boats are a political priority for the British government and a bone of contention with France, as tens of thousands of people a year have been making the dangerous crossing.
According to the British government, nearly 30,000 people crossed the Channel from mainland Europe to Britain in small boats in 2023, an annual drop of more than a third.
In November 2021, at least 27 people drowned when their dinghy capsized.
