“The incident took place three hours after we left…” Mohammed Isa Omar from Somalia told Rudaw’s Znar Shino in northern France on Monday evening. He said water began to enter the boat and “it broke and was filled with water.”
Omar said they called both France and Britain, but “Most of the calls were for Britain asking for help."
Omar is currently in a wheelchair and his legs are covered in bandages. He said the skin of part of his body is gone because of the long hours he had to swim in the sea.
“They [the British] said send us location, but we did not have time and the phones fell into the water, and people started dying,” he said, speaking in Arabic from a location near Calais.
Asked if the British heard their cries, Omar said, “Yes they could hear us, we were crying for help and we called twice, not just once.”
“We drowned in the British sea,” Omar said, repeating it, “We drowned in British waters.”
Related: Exclusive: Migrant survivor says British coastguard ignored call for help
The disaster happened in the early hours of Wednesday morning. More than 30 migrants were on board, from Kurdistan, Iran, Somalia, Egypt, Vietnam, and possibly Ethiopia. They set off in an inflatable boat from somewhere on the coastline around Dunkirk the night before, about 10:00 pm local time.
The only other known survivor of the incident, Mohammed from the Kurdistan Region, gave detailed testimony in an interview with Znar Shino on Sunday. He recounted the horrors of the last hours of the migrants, including children and women, whose calls for help went unheeded by the British and French.
There has been some confusion about Mohammed’s identity. He told Rudaw’s Znar Shino that the confusion about his name and where he came from was deliberate because he was afraid of smugglers who have threatened him. On Monday evening, he confirmed that his name is Mohammed Shekha Ahmad and he is from the town of Qaladze in the Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq. He had been inaccurately named as Mohammed Khaled and Mohammed Ibrahimzadeh in previous reports. Rudaw reporter Znar Shino has confirmed that Mohammed Shekha, as of Monday evening, sought the protection of French police in Calais.
Mohammed Shekha had said there were 33 migrants on board and a relative of some of the migrants who was following the boat’s progress online said there were 34 people in the dinghy. The relative, Taha (not his real name), told Rudaw that he could see on Facebook live location that the boat was about five kilometres inside British territorial waters when it ran into trouble.
The Somali survivor Omar said he does not remember the number of migrants, but said the boat was full. “No one came. The boat was sinking, the people were dead and I was swimming. We were in the sea for ten hours,” he said. He believes just two people survived: “One Iraqi and me only... I swam a lot and I was exhausted. I heard later in the hospital that he had survived too and 31 people had died.”
Related: Kurdish woman drowned in English Channel attempting to reach fiancé
A French fishing vessel found the survivors around 12 hours after their boat capsized, informing the French coastguard which brought the pair to hospital in France.
Omar said that most of the people on the boat were Kurds as well as two Egyptians and four Ethiopians.
The British Home Office, in an email, denied the allegations of Mohammed Shekha that Britain failed to help the migrants. The British Maritime and Coastguard Agency has not answered repeated emails asking whether they received any distress calls on the night of the incident.
The migrant who talked to the coastguard spoke “very good English,” Omar said.
Asked where he wants to go now, Omar replied, “I have no idea. It is like we were just born again and our brain does not work yet. My mind is tired and I have pain.”
