Lost at sea: France migrant graves recount tragic Channel crossings

After 20-year-old Sudanese migrant Yasser died trying to climb onto a truck crossing the Channel to Britain, he was laid to rest far from his home country in a cemetery in northern France.

"He was so young," said French aid worker Mariam Guerey of his death in 2021.

Yasser is one of at least 404 people to have died since 1999 attempting to cross the Channel to what they hoped would be a brighter future in Britain, humanitarian groups say.

That figure does not include those who have gone missing trying to reach English shores via the tunnel under the Channel, as stowaways on ferries or at sea on overcrowded dinghies.

In the French port city of Calais, a group of aid workers and volunteers is scrambling to identify a mounting number of dead in order to give them a dignified burial.

At one of the city's main cemeteries, Guerey reeled off the names of those the group had helped bury in recent years.

Abubakr, a 26-year-old also from Sudan, was run over by a train in 2022.

"He was always taking pictures," Guerey said.

In the Calais North cemetery, the Muslim corner is almost full. Many of its occupants are people who left their homes in Africa or the Middle East.

Their graves are often simple mounds of earth, topped with a name and date of death on a metal plate.

50-euro banknote

The body of Behzad, an Iranian born in 1988, washed ashore in 2020, a single 50-euro ($54) bill carefully wrapped in a plastic pouch still on him.

"He had set out alone, rowing," Guerey said.

The aid worker said she visited all the informal migrant camps in the area with the waterproofed banknote to ask for help to identify him.

Eventually, a fellow migrant said Behzad had given him 50 euros before setting off and had kept the same amount for himself.

As Behzad was a Shia Muslim, "his family asked us to put a black cloth on his grave and to place a special cake on top of it," Guerey said.

In the Calais North cemetery, the names on some graves have faded over time.

In 2022, the Caritas France charity tried to raise funds to remedy the situation, but was only able to give a few a cement border.

Surrounded by white pebbles and covered in flowers, the grave of Salim — a migrant who died in 2017 — stands out, however.

His friend Amjad, a 36-year-old Libyan who has found work as a welder, says he visits to tend it whenever he can.

"It's important," he said.

Amjad said he also comes to attend the funerals of other migrants when he is free, and once a year celebrates his lost friend with a meal.

Stuffed toy and tulips

As for seven-year-old Rola, she lies in a cemetery a 30-minute drive away near the city of Dunkirk.

A stuffed toy monkey and a bunch of tulips sit on top of her grave.

She drowned in early March when the dinghy she and her family had boarded capsized in a canal leading to the Channel. Her parents and her brothers survived.

Members of the burial initiative say they do their best to give each person the appropriate burial.

But when a person's religion is unknown, "we perform two burials in front of the grave, one Christian and one Muslim," Guerey said.

Only rarely are families able to raise the funds needed to bring home the remains of their loved ones.

Sending a coffin back to war-torn Syria costs $6,500 to 8,600), she said, by way of example.

When the family choose a burial in France, she and other aid workers organise fundraising and the migrant community pitches in to cover the costs.

But extended identity checks, nowadays requiring DNA tests, mean many Muslim migrants cannot be given the same-day burial that is customary in their religion, aid workers and an undertaker said.

Of five irregular migrants who drowned in January, three still had not been buried, they said.