The Silent Serial Killer: 391 Deaths in 25 Years at the UK Border

By Maël Galisson / openDemocracy

On 11 January 1999, an Iraqi man was found dead in the port of Dover, England. Hidden under the trailer of a lorry, at axle level, he had just crossed the border from France when the jolts of the lorry knocked him off balance. He fell to the ground and was immediately crushed by the wheels.

The identity of this man is unknown, as is his personal history. His death would have gone unnoticed if nobody had found his body.

He is not the only one to have lost his life on this journey. Between 1 January 1999 and 1 January 2024, 391 migrants died on the border between the UK, France and Belgium.

These deaths were documented by French media outlet Les Jours in a study that is as unprecedented as it is exceptional. Name, age, gender, nationality, migratory route, circumstances of death. For years the journalists at Les Jours searched for and compiled all possible information on the migrants who disappeared along this maritime border.

openDemocracy has now published the investigation in English, so the UK can know what the French now know.

The Calais Memorial found at the end of this piece lists the victims so that they are not forgotten. It counts the dead because those lives matter.

The border: a silent serial killer

There have been at least 391 deaths in 25 years. This is almost certainly an undercount, as it’s unlikely that all disappearances have been reported by journalists, activists or law enforcement. People died before 1999 as well, but the data isn’t good enough to learn about them systematically. And people have not stopped dying since: five more drowned and one died in a lorry trailer this month, after our investigation ended.

Three hundred and ninety one lives cut short on this coast. A quiet, never-ending litany. It’s as if a serial killer had been on the loose for a quarter of a century and neither the police nor the courts had noticed. The reality, though, is worse: law and policy enforcement have been this killer’s accomplice from the start.

We’ll read about that later on in the series. First: who are the victims?

The vast majority of migrants who have died around Calais come from the Global South, particularly from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Sudanese, Iraqis, Vietnamese, and Chinese account for over a third of victims. Most have left countries classified as “authoritarian regimes”, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index.

They thought the ship was bound for England, but instead it set sail for Ireland. After five days inside, the container had become their tomb

The victims fled from Afghanistan, which hasn’t seen much of peace in over 40 years, from Isaias Afwerki’s autocratic rule in Eritrea, and from the civil war in Darfur, Sudan. They departed Iran, Iraq and Turkey, where Kurdish minorities and dissidents have suffered state violence alongside economic and political hardship. And they’ve run from the implosion of Yugoslavia, the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the war in Syria, and the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban.

All these events and more have left their traces thousands of kilometres away in Calais.

The ‘Calais killer’ strikes men most of the time. However, 20% of Vietnamese victims have been women, as have 18% of Eritrean, 13% of Turkish, and 12% of Iranian victims.

Among them were Zebiba Ali Saïd and Ghebretnsae Ganet, both from Eritrea and both killed by vehicles in 2015, and Mitra Mehrad, a 31-year-old woman from Iran, who drowned while crossing to England in August 2019. She fell out of a boat carrying 19 other people.

Often invisible, women are nevertheless numerous on the roads around Calais.

Most of the victims are also young. For those we believe we have a definite age for (251 of 391 victims), the median age is 25 years old. But they span from infants to people in their mid-50s. Over 40 children have died.

Take, for example, Samiye Guler and her two sons, Imam and Berkam, ages nine and four, as well as Hasan Kalendragil and his two children, Kalender and Zeliha, ages 15 and ten. They were all born in Turkish Kurdistan. Along with two others, they were found dead in a container they had climbed into at the port of Zeebrugge, Belgium – about 100 kilometres north of Calais – in 2001. It was loaded onto a ship that they thought was bound for England, but instead it set sail for Ireland. After five days inside, the container had become their tomb.

Or take the seven people who drowned off the coast of Loon-Plage, a commune in the Nord region between Calais and Dunkirk, in October 2020. They were trying to cross the North Sea in a boat. Among them was a family from Iranian Kurdistan: Rasul Iran Nezhad, 35, and Shiva Mohammad Panahi, 32, and their three children, Anita, Armin, and Artin, aged nine, six, and 15 months.

For years, some of the world’s youth have been washed up dead on the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coastline.

A steady drumbeat of death

The numbers change from year to year, but the ‘Calais killer’ does kill every year. In the first chart above, the death peaks correspond to cases of collective death.

In June 2000, 54 men and four women of Chinese nationality died of asphyxiation in a truck coming out of Zeebrugge. Their bodies were discovered by customs officials in Dover.

In October 2019, 39 people were found asphyxiated in a trailer container on an industrial estate in Grays, England. The eight women and 31 men were all from northeast Vietnam.

And on 24 November 2021, 31 lives were lost, among them seven women, when a boat sank off the coast of Loon-Plage. Most were from Iraqi Kurdistan.

There have been others.

Despite the increasing militarisation of the border, migrants haven’t stopped trying to get to England

Such instances of gruesome, mass death often make the headlines. They may even receive some political attention. But they are like monuments within a large cemetery. Particularly noticeable perhaps, but the bodies beneath them are no more dead than those around them.

There have been people hit by rail freight shuttles or struck by high voltage cables on the Eurotunnel site. People run over by vehicles, crushed by goods inside a trailer, or crushed by the axles of a truck. People drowned inside the Calais port or just offshore. All equally dead, even when they go unnoticed.

The majority died while attempting to cross the border. Unable to take a train or board a ferry due to their irregularity on European soil, over three-quarters died from asphyxiation, drowning, or road accidents. Trains were involved in 6% of deaths and homicides account for another 6%. Death through lack of care, suicide, and other or unknown causes account for 9%.

The lethal truth

Laying all these deaths out one after another reveals a harsh reality. Despite the increasing militarisation of the border, migrants haven’t stopped trying to get to England. They have instead turned to riskier and often more distant methods to try to adapt. They’ve tried ferries, the Eurotunnel, lorries upstream of Calais, and the ring road leading to the port in Belgium. Today, many are attempting by sea.

For nearly three decades the city of Calais has bunkered down. Its fortifications include concrete barriers, barbed wire, video surveillance, police and gendarmerie, patrols on horseback, motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles, and drones. But the dead keep piling up.

On 10 March 2023, London committed a further €541 million (~£476 million) over three years to “increase the interception rate and drastically reduce the number of crossings”. This money was for 500 additional police officers and gendarmes, “new infrastructure and surveillance equipment”, and the deployment of “drones, helicopters and aircraft”.

Two months later, on 10 May, a migrant died after being hit by a lorry on the ring road leading to the port of Calais. Ahmed Youssef Adam was 30 years old and originally from Sudan. His death left little trace in the media or political discourse. He was one of 24 who died in the last nine months of last year.

The slaughter continues.

---

You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.

---