Why won’t the police let me leave Britain, asks migrant living under a rowing boat
AN ILLEGAL Channel migrant living under a rowing boat on a Kent beach is struggling to leave the country.
In an astonishing claim, the 25-yearold Syrian says he is ‘trapped’ in this country and wants to get out.
He has been trying to escape the UK since last summer when he was evicted from a hotel in Leeds used by the Home Office for asylum seekers.
For five months, he has played a nighttime cat-and-mouse game with police in the port of Dover as he tries to secretly climb on a cross-Channel lorry leaving by ferry for France.
Alaa Eldin yesterday said: ‘The police spot me and bring me back to my boat on the beach. Two months ago, I was stopped by them when I was trying to get on a lorry. The police put me in a cell for a day and then set me free.
‘Last Monday night, two officers caught me in the lorry park near the beach where I live. I was spotted on CCTV and they marched me back to my boat.’
When the Daily Mail found Alaa sleeping there the next morning, he told us how he claimed asylum after arriving in Dover on a people traffickers’ rubber dinghy from France in August 2021 – one of 28,526 migrants to cross the Channel that year. On arrival, he told the Home
‘Officers caught me and they marched me back’
Office he had run away from the Syrian civil war as a teenager and his return would mean a call-up to the army, where his life would be endangered.
Alaa recalled: ‘I originally left Syria nine years ago. I travelled on my own to Germany by going through Turkey and paying for a traffickers’ boat ride to Greece to enter the European Union.
‘I went to Germany where I had family members. But three years ago, I rowed with them because they are devout and they say I am not a good Muslim because I smoke and drink.’
After his family fall- out, he left and headed for northern France, which took him three ‘quick’ days.
‘I thought the UK would be a good place to find work in the construction industry, I am a talented plasterer,’ he said.
But he broke Home Office asylum rules five months ago when he left the Britannia Hotel in Leeds for a week to try to earn some money on the black market. When he returned hoping for a bed, he was told by officials that his asylum claim was being struck out. He headed for Dover.
‘There is nothing for me in Britain now,’ he said as he looked down at the pink plastic women’s sandals he wears in a hopeless attempt to stay warm as winds and rain lashes Dover.
Occasionally, well-wishers leave him cans of beer beside the upturned boat on the pebbly beach. Alaa said: ‘I had money in euros which I earned on building work when I came to England but it has all been stolen along the way as I carried cash. I have nothing left now.’
He would dearly like to pay a people traffickers’ ‘agent’ to put him on a lorry or private boat to sail undetected to France.
However, the going rate can run to more than £1,800 – and he added: ‘Other migrants have left that way but I cannot raise that.’
Two of his migrant friends, who also lived on the beach in other upturned boats, have slipped recently onto lorries to return to France. ‘A lot of people who came over the Channel want to leave now – there is nothing for us here,’ said Alaa.
The Government is closing 50 hotels used for migrants to reduce the £8million-a-night cost to taxpayers.
Councils are facing frantic requests for them to re-home people in hostels, bed and breakfast accommodation and subsidised flats at a time when waiting lists for Britons needing housing are already long.
Disenchanted with the UK, Alaa – who speaks English, Arabic and German – wants to try his luck at re-settling in Germany. He claimed: ‘I’m trapped on the beach.’
Last month a Russian lorry driver was jailed for four years and four months at Canterbury Crown Court for attempting to smuggle 22 North African migrants out of Britain. They were discovered in his trailer at Dover docks before he boarded a ferry for France.
The National Crime Agency has warned that traffickers are illegally smuggling people out of, as well as into, the UK.
Kent Police did not respond to a request for comment.