ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) on Sunday announced that it will return the bodies of Kurdish migrants who drowned in the deadliest migrant disaster in the English Channel to date when their inflatable boat capsized while attempting to cross from France to England.
Following the events of last month, the Region’s Prime Minister Masrour Barzani “tasked the department of foreign relations and the KRG’s representative in France to take all necessary measures to identify and return the bodies of the incident’s victims,” read a statement from the KRG’s Department of Media and Information.
The statement added that France will be officially sending the names of those who drowned to the KRG in order to take necessary measures to transport the bodies of the victims home.
A boat carrying 33 migrants from different countries, including Iraq and the Kurdistan Region, capsized in the English Channel on November 24. There are only two known survivors of the disaster, including a Kurd from the Region.
The two survivors and relatives of migrants who were tracking the boat’s movement on live location have accused the British coastguards of ignoring repeated calls of help from drowning migrants as they were reportedly in British waters.
The Home Office commander in charge of stopping English Channel migrant crossings earlier this month failed to disclose to a UK parliamentary committee if the boat that attempted to cross the Channel on November 24 made contact with UK authorities prior to the drowning of the people on the boat.
“At this stage, I can’t tell you with any certainty whether we definitely received a call from that boat or not”, the Home Office’s Clandestine Channel Threat Commander Dan O’Mahoney said, adding that “it may never be possible to say with absolute accuracy whether that boat was in UK waters or French waters prior to that.”
According to data provided to Rudaw in October by the head of Summit (Lutka) Foundation for Refugee and Displaced Affairs Ari Jalal, in the past seven years over 633,000 people from Kurdistan Region and Iraq have migrated abroad. Of them, over 260 have died on the way.
Jalal added that in the first ten months of 2021, around 37,000 people from the Kurdistan Region and Iraq had migrated abroad.
Updated at 12:30pm.
