“Three people were found dead aboard a small boat early on Thursday after launching from Dunkirk,” says BBC News online. There was a fourth in a separate incident: “One man died after a vessel capsized.”
The three “people”, as the BBC does not say, were women.
La Dépêche du Midi, a newspaper based in Toulouse, France reports (auto-translation):
“According to initial information gathered by Delta FM, three of them did not die by drowning… An investigation will be opened to determine the circumstances of these deaths.”
Dubai-based National News reports
“French authorities have said… three women suffered heart attacks after their boat launched…
“The women, reportedly aged about 20, 30 and 50, were brought ashore by the French emergency services, but attempts to resuscitate them failed, and all three were declared dead.
“They were on one of the so-called taxi boats operated by human-trafficking gangs that were sailed along the coast to pick up people at designated spots before attempting the crossing.”
The BBC merely says that “three unconscious people” were “found dead.”
Our national broadcaster may think it is being responsible by omitting and glossing over facts, perhaps to prevent inflammatory speculation by “far-right” commenters but as we saw with the Southport murders committed by Axel Rudakubana if the public feels it is being deceived the speculation is intensified.
Already the questions must mutiply.
Had this incident occurred on a boat travelling from Dover to France one might have expected all the surviving travellers to be arrested by British police pending investigation into suspicious deaths. Instead the French appear to have simply taken off the corpses and allowed the other migrants to proceed towards England; and to have diagnosed “heart attacks” in advance of post-mortems.
Little wonder that public trust in authority and established institutions is eroding. We cannot safely allow them to be, in Alan Clark’s 1992 phrase, “economical with the actualité.”
1 comment:
20 is awfully young for a heart attack
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