Witnesses recount tragedy of vessel that capsized while carrying migrants

SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq — The boat packed with migrants was about halfway across the English Channel when one of the passengers spotted two orange life jackets bobbing in the water.

The seas were rough, and it was only when they got closer that Zana Hamawandani saw the vests contained dead bodies.

Soon, other bodies started appearing. As Hamawandani watched, the current pushed one of them under his inflatable boat, where it collided with the whirling blades of the outboard motor.

“It came up again, but I saw it floating for just a few seconds before the waves took it away,” he said. He remembered it was the body of a man wearing baggy pants.

Another migrant, Karzan Mangury, said he was so horrified by the corpses he tried to look away. “Our boat was surrounded by dead bodies,” Mangury said. “At that moment my entire body was shaking.”

Their accounts, in phone interviews from an immigration facility in England, are the first time they have spoken to news media and are among the only witness descriptions of the last minutes of the disaster. At least 27 people are believed to have died, the biggest single loss of life in the channel since the International Organization for Migration began collecting data in 2014.

Along with the accounts of relatives of some of the victims, their descriptions also tell a story of hours of frantic and futile calls for help to authorities as the migrant boat was sinking.

At one point, Mangury said, he made 10 calls to a number French police had given him to try to report his location, and no one answered. His description of his phone calls is the first public account by a migrant who spoke directly with English and French police to report the sinking.

A few minutes after seeing the corpses, Hamawandani and Mangury said they saw a mostly submerged, deflated boat with at least two people clinging to it — believed to be the only survivors of a migrant boat that sank in the channel Nov. 24.

“They were shouting; we could hear them yelling for help,” said Hamawandani, a 21-year-old Iraqi Kurd.

Eventually the British Coast Guard rescued Hamawandani’s vessel, and a French fishing boat picked up the two survivors of the sunken boat.

The disaster has injected a new sense of urgency into efforts by European countries to control high-risk channel crossings better. Activists also believe the deaths highlight a contentious, ineffective partnership between Britain and France that has failed to improve the protocols for rescuing migrants in distress.