Tragedy of the boy of 14 who couldn’t swim
A SYRIAN boy of 14 was one of the five migrants who drowned when their dinghy capsized yards from the French coast earlier this month.
Obada Abd Rabbo died alongside his 24-year-old brother, Ayser. Both could not swim.
Despite the freezing temperatures, traffickers had launched the dinghy from Wimereux, near Boulogne, in the early hours of January 14.
Unlike other crossings, which usually leave from beaches, the doomed craft was launched from a slipway in the middle of a huge sea wall at high tide. The brothers, from Daraa, and 0 others desperately tried to board the dinghy before it was dragged into deeper water.
They had paid their Syrian smugglers £1,700 each for the crossing. As part of their fare, they were given motorbike inner tubes as flotation aids.
In the chaos, the brothers vanished from sight and their bodies were later pulled from the water yards from the slipway. Survivor Faris, 23, told the BBC: ‘They started screaming and asking for help. I couldn’t see them any more. They disappeared into the water. The water pulled them, I couldn’t reach them. We didn’t know it would be [deep] like this.’
French police were reportedly patrolling nearby, and a navy helicopter and patrol boat arrived at the scene at 2.15am. About 20 migrants were treated for hypothermia.
Tragically Obada, a keen footballer with dreams of being a doctor, may have made the perilous journey in the misguided hope he could bring his ailing father to the UK for treatment, friends told the BBC.
Obada and Ayser reportedly began their journey last May, flying to Libya where they travelled on a smuggler’s boat to Italy and crossed into France.
They travelled on to Calais, where they pitched tents under a bridge with other Syrians, before trying their ill-fated Channel crossing a week later.
Older brother Nada reportedly made the same crossing two years earlier and is said to have encouraged his siblings to do the same. After his brothers’ fate, a devastated Nada suggested to the BBC that he felt guilty and wished Obada had stayed in Syria.
Nada was granted refugee status last October and leave to remain in the UK for five years.