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The silent serial killer: 391 deaths in 25 years at the UK border [1]

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Date: 2024-02 

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.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/the-silent-serial-killer-391-deaths-in-25-years-at-the-uk-border/

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