French Navy rescued 72 migrants who had run into difficulties on the English Channel, the strait between the UK and France, French news agency reports AFP. The coast guard received a warning on Sunday that several boats off the coast of Calais had run into problems.
38 people on one of the boats were rescued by a French patrol ship and taken to Calais. The other 34 people were picked up by a tug of the French navy and brought to Boulogne-sur-Mer in France.
All persons on board, eleven of them children, are in good health and received by the rescue services.
It is not the first time that refugees have tried to cross the Channel. From 2018, the number of illegal crossings across the Channel to the United Kingdom has risen sharply. In 2020 alone, there were 9,500 crossings or crossing attempts, four times more than the year before.
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