Drivers said Eurotunnel was ‘a picture of war’ amid migrant deaths

Omid Jamil Ali never saw England.

The 21-year-old Kurd left Sharbarza in northern Iraq in August 2001, hoping to reach the United Kingdom. He crossed into Iran and then into Turkey, reaching Italy less than two weeks after his departure. From there he went to Calais.

It was the end of his journey. He died on 18 October 2001 after a fall near the Channel tunnel.

He is one of 391 migrants who died on the border between the UK, France and Belgium between 1 January 1999 and 1 January 2024, and whose lives and deaths are recounted in this series.

Young men searching for a future

On the French side, the Eurotunnel site covers more than 650 hectares, forming a rail loop that extends north and west into the rocky coastline of the Calais region. The embarkation terminal for trucks and cars is located in the commune of Coquelles, while the tunnel starts a little further on, at Peuplingues.

“Shortly before entering, the trains are forced to slow down,” said Arun Kundnani, a researcher who documented Ali’s death.

Positioned on a bridge overlooking the tracks, Ali waited for the right moment to leap onto a moving train. “He jumped onto a wagon, but fell when the train accelerated,” Kundnani said. His body wasn’t found until it reached Folkestone on the English side.

At the time of Sangatte, migrant intrusions were an almost daily occurrence on the Eurotunnel site

“Like many young Iraqis, Omid [Jamil Ali] had left Kurdistan to help his family back home,” Kundnani explained. In the early 2000s, “the Kurds were caught in a vice between the targeted repression of Saddam Hussein's regime and Western sanctions [...] Young people, especially men, were encouraged to leave the region to try and find work in Western Europe.”

So without much of a plan, Omid left for the UK. If he’d made it, one option would have been the slaughterhouse. “In the north of England, there were factories where chickens were bred, packaged and sent to supermarkets. The work was dirty, hot and hard,” Kundnani said. “It’s a fact that these companies were hiring undocumented Iraqi Kurds to do the work because nobody else wanted to do it.”

Ali was the third man to die on the Eurotunnel site that year. In February 2001, Houner Abdulaye Iman, an Iraqi man in his thirties, was hit by a rail freight shuttle. Two months after that, a migrant was electrocuted while trying to board a shuttle.

The outlet Libération published an article about the latter incident titled ‘La mort du migrant inconnu’ – ‘the death of the unknown migrant’. But he had a name, it can be found on his death certificate: Saratch Houdin Mohamad Harun. He was born in Ghazni, Afghanistan in 1977.

Both men are buried in the Coquelles cemetery, overlooking the Eurotunnel site.

A tunnel of possibility

The opening of the Eurotunnel in 1994 created a land border between the United Kingdom and France, governed by the 1986 Treaty of Canterbury. This allowed British and French police to carry out immigration checks in each other’s territories, and thereby gave officers a chance to turn back irregular migrants before they crossed.

The Eurotunnel was hardly an easy route in, but for anybody wanting to get to the UK it presented a new possibility. And, starting with the war in Kosovo in the late 1990s, more and more people were turning up in Calais with exactly that goal in mind.

In September 1999, under pressure from civil society, a hangar previously used in the construction of the tunnel was requisitioned for use as accommodation. It became known as the Sangatte camp, and it was a gamechanger.

“Because of the Channel tunnel's geographic proximity [to Sangette], most attempted crossings were directed towards the Eurotunnel site,” said Olivier Clochard, a geographer who studies this border. “People would try to climb into trucks or freight trains, or sometimes they would try to get on the Eurostar at Fréthun station.”

Dominique Mégard, a former IT specialist with the company, confirmed this. “At the time of the Sangatte camp, migrant intrusions were an almost daily occurrence on the Eurotunnel site,” he said. “Every night, when the majority of trucks were in transit, there were interruptions to traffic. Guys were managing to get onto the site by cutting through the fence.”

Mégard said that every morning he read reports about what had happened the previous night. “More often than not, migrants would try to enter at terminal level, in order to hide on, under, or inside a truck,” he said. “At the time, Eurotunnel only had a conventional rail fencing system, one aimed at preventing any intrusion by stray animals, for example.”

A tunnel of danger

Like the Calais Port (see part 2), the tunnel began to receive security upgrades.

“Very quickly, the Eurotunnel site became barricaded, with a first, a second, and then a third fence.” Clochard said.

In 2000, an initial programme doubled the 40 kilometres of fencing with a second barrier. It was equipped with infrared detectors, linked to a video surveillance system, and topped with concertina wire.

Reinforcement efforts did not stop people from trying to get through, but they did make any attempt riskier and more complicated

Then, in the summer of 2001, the cross-Channel Eurotunnel group launched “Operation Zero Tolerance”. The company reinforced the fences with steel cords that were almost impossible to cut. It installed gates on the access bridges bringing vehicles up to the platforms. And it hired 60 new security guards. Total cost: €4.5 million.

These efforts did not stop people from trying to get through, but they did make any attempt riskier and more complicated.

In January 2002, a man in his twenties was electrocuted on the roof of a freight train. A month later, a migrant was found dead in the tunnel by a maintenance crew. And in February 2002, another migrant was fatally crushed as he and four others tried to board a freight shuttle.

Tensions rose as the incursions continued, both locally and between Paris and London. In September 2002 the two governments reached an agreement to close the Sangatte camp, and by November it was shut. But the migrants who had been living there didn’t just disappear.

Instead, Clochard said, they “scattered”. Informal camps sprung up from Cherbourg to Ostend in Belgium, at Dunkirk, and in Norrent-Fontes, a small village in the Pas-de-Calais region. And all the while, he added, “attempts to cross both via the port and via the Eurotunnel continued.”

Calais in the summer of migration

Between 2014 and 2016 the number of migrants in Calais rose from a few hundred to several thousand. It was the time of the Jungle camp and, as a result of successive operations to “secure” the port (see Part 2), attempted crossings by way of the tunnel became more frequent. They were deadly years.

Take just the month of July 2015:

On 7 July, Abd El Majed Mohammed Ibrahim died falling from a train. Aged 45, he was a Sudanese father of two.

On 14 July, three migrants were struck by an electric arc as they approached a freight shuttle. One of them, a 23-year-old Pakistani named Mohamad Achrat, died.

On 19 July, Houmed Moussa, a 17-year-old Eritrean, drowned in a retention basin on the Eurotunnel site.

And on 23 July, Husham Osman Alzubair, a 22-year-man from Sudan, was found dead on a Eurostar carriage when it pulled into Folkestone. He was probably electrocuted.

The situation was so bad that, from mid-July onwards, Eurotunnel was distributing leaflets in various languages warning migrants of the mortal risks they were running by attempting to cross. But it wasn’t enough.

In the last week of July 2015, a 23-year-old Eritrean woman was killed by a car at the access ramp to the tunnel terminal. A 30-year-old Pakistani man died from injuries sustained while climbing onto a cargo shuttle. And a Sudanese migrant was killed by a truck as it disembarked from a rail shuttle.

The drivers expressed “their fear of colliding, of crushing, of electrocuting, of reducing to a pulp some poor wretch, someone damned by the Earth"

The British and French authorities reacted in August 2015 by signing yet another bilateral agreement, which included a commitment:

To invest additional United Kingdom resources in (a) making the perimeter of the railhead secure, through a combination of high quality fencing, CCTV and infrared detection technology and flood lighting, (b) strengthening security within the tunnel itself, and (c) supporting Eurotunnel Ltd. to increase substantially the number of security guards protecting the site.

This agreement also led to the construction of new barriers, the reinforcement of old barriers, the clearing of 100 hectares of land to facilitate surveillance, and the flooding of areas to create water obstacles.

Three more migrants died on the Eurotunnel site the next month: two hit by freight shuttles, one by electrocution.

Train drivers ‘sick with fear’

At the end of September 2015, the CGT Eurotunnel trade union published a letter addressed to the public authorities.

In it, train drivers declared that they “no longer wish to continue to exercise [their] profession in such conditions of stress, anxiety and sickened with fear.”

They expressed “their fear of starting, their fear of finishing, their fear of driving, their fear of colliding, of crushing, of electrocuting, of reducing to a pulp some poor wretch, some disinherited person, someone cursed by life, someone damned by the Earth”.

They asked: “How many more people will be injured? How many dead? Are we going to have to put up with this morbid accounting over the long term? How long will we continue to be haunted by these surreal images and situations, not only in the course of our work but also when we're resting?”

The trade unionists ended by observing what securitisation has created: “There's barbed wire, there's police, there are people with guns, there are dogs, but no trees, no trees at all. A picture of war.”

Explore the rest of the series

1. INTRODUCTION | 391 deaths in 25 years at the UK border
   MEMORIAL | Our cemetery of 391 migrant deaths
2. PORT | Dying by the ferries in Calais
3. TUNNEL | Drivers said Eurotunnel ‘a picture of war’
4. HOMICIDE | Punitive killings in Calais overlooked
5. POLICE | Police violence ‘rarely punished’ at the border
6. LORRIES | 20 years of dying in lorries but still ‘no change’
7. BOATS | The path to the ‘small boats’ crisis
8. SUICIDE | A border designed to create despair
9. REMEMBRANCE | 25 years of victims: ‘Your borders, our dead’
10. EXPLAINER | Channel border violence from a UK perspective