An illegal immigrant from Senegal who agreed to pilot an “unseaworthy” dinghy across the English Channel has been convicted of manslaughter after it sank and four of his passengers drowned.
Ibrahima Bah, whose exact age is unknown, was found guilty on Monday of facilitating illegal entry to the UK and four counts of manslaughter following a retrial at Canterbury Crown Court.
The trial heard the home-made inflatable was very poor quality and was not seaworthy enough to carry the 43 migrants who scrambled on board it on the French coast.
Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson, KC, said Bah appeared to have been promised free passage to England by people traffickers if he agreed to pilot the boat.
He told the jury that, having agreed to, Bah owed the others on the boat a, “duty of care.”
There were insufficient life jackets on board the dinghy and no flares or radio and Bah had no training and scanty experience on fishing boats in Senegal.
Mr. Atkinson said, “He was aware that the boat was overcrowded, lacking in safety equipment and, as it took in water, that it was increasingly unseaworthy.”
Bah told the court he had left Senegal in 2019 and was trying to get to Britain to claim asylum, although it was unclear what reason he planned to give to the authorities.
Although it has recently undergone political turbulence Senegal was, at the time, a democratic country with no record of human rights abuses.
Boat Owned by Kurdish People Traffickers
Witnesses said Kurdish people traffickers transported the migrants to the shore in three cars and then inflated the boat, which had been brought in another vehicle.The court heard the boat got into trouble 30 minutes after leaving the French coast, but instead of turning back, Bah kept going.
The crew on a British fishing boat, the Arcturus, came across the sinking dinghy and tried to rescue the passengers with help from the RNLI, air ambulance and UK Border Force.
The 39 survivors were brought to shore in the port of Dover, and the exact number of migrants who drowned is unknown, although it was at least four.
The trial heard one of the dead migrants was called Hajratullah Ahmadi, but the identities of the other three remain unclear. All were men.
During the trial one of those who was on the boat, Amrullah Ahmadzai, said the passengers began screaming and calling for help on their mobile phones as it began to sink.
He said Bah was shouting at everyone, “Calm down, I’m going to take you there.”
Giving evidence in court, Bah said the people traffickers beat him up and threatened to kill him when he refused to pilot the boat.
But Mr. Atkinson claimed Bah was lying and had changed his story.
Libby Clark, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said, “Bah claimed that he had sailed boats before and, as a result, received free passage, whereas everyone else on the boat had paid thousands of Euros to make the tragic journey.”
She said, “The boat he piloted was never designed to undertake a crossing in the world’s busiest shipping lane and would have been all but invisible to other ships. Navigation was carried out with just mobile phones, as there were no other navigational aids available.”
“Any reasonable person would have recognised that by piloting such an ill-equipped and overloaded boat in such dangerous circumstances, there was an obvious risk of serious harm to the passengers. As a result of Bah’s actions, four men tragically lost their lives in the Channel that night. Our thoughts remain with their families,” added Ms. Clark.
Bah will be sentenced on Friday.
