‘Reduced to a brawl’: punitive killings in Calais overlooked

It was a warm summer evening and Michel Delannoy, a priest in the Arras diocese in northern France, had invited all the refugees living in the Norrent-Fontes camp to eat pancakes.

“It was nice. There was a good atmosphere,” Delannoy said. “The gendarmerie called around 7am the next morning, saying ‘There has been a problem, can you come over?’”

At the station Delannoy was handed a photo of a man lying on the ground. The priest was shocked to recognise Mansour Hamid. They had eaten pancakes together only a few hours before.

“There was a fight,” the gendarme said, “this man died.”

Hamid, 23, was from Eritrea. He was killed at a freeway rest area in 2008, some 75 kilometres southeast of Calais. 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.

The making of a deadly coast

Migrants don’t have to be actively trying to cross the English Channel for it to play a role in their death. Its mere presence can help kill them before they even make the attempt.

It is so wide, and so well fortified, that there are only a few ways to get to the other side. Transit points are a scarce resource, and as with any situation of scarcity there is competition. For 25 years, migrants have struggled over access to and control of the ways into England.

Sometimes those struggles turn deadly. Since 1999, 25 homicide victims have been recorded in this area. Some, but not all, have been over turf.

Hamid wasn’t a smuggler. But that’s why Hamid died.

It’s possible to carve out a niche as someone who controls the flow of stowaways. It’s possible to become a smuggler

Let’s step back for a moment to see how he got there.

In the mid-2000s, makeshift camps began to appear along the A25 and A26, the two main roads heading toward the coast in northern France. They emerged near rest areas, hidden away in forests, ditches, or sometimes abandoned buildings. The Autoroute des Anglais (Motorway of the English) was quickly becoming the motorway of Eritreans, Afghans and Vietnamese.

Lily Boillet, a former president of the migrant solidarity organisation Terre d’errance, recalled the first time she encountered this phenomenon. Back in 2007, she said, she was surprised to see “black men and women, in small groups, walking along the side of the road” near her village, some 70 kilometres southeast of Calais. She couldn’t figure out where they were going.

“I was cycling along the roads in this so-called flat country, but I saw nothing,” Boillet said. By chance she saw an interview with Delannoy in the local paper. She contacted him, and he agreed to take her to meet them.

In “a grove, on the edge of a field”, Boillet came into contact with the Norrent-Fontes camp for the first time. A small group of people from Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan were living there, she said, in “tents made of black plastic sheeting, hung with bits of string and bottle caps”. The conditions were “deplorable”.

A few hundred metres away sat the Saint-Hilaire-Cottes service area, one of the last stopping points before the border. “Trucks inevitably stop here, either to refuel or to spend the night,” Boillet said, “so it's possible to slip more or less discreetly into their trailers.”

And where that’s possible, it’s also possible to carve out a niche as someone who controls the flow of stowaways. It’s possible to become a smuggler.

Turf wars

At Saint-Hilaire-Cottes, “being a smuggler meant keeping watch, checking the truck's destination, opening and closing the trailer door, all as discreetly as possible,” Boillet said. After her first meeting she spent countless hours chatting with the camp’s residents, making her an invaluable witness to their daily lives.

She said smuggling had its dangers. “They risked being arrested, tried in immediate appearance and sentenced to six to nine months in prison,” she said. Before Norrent-Fontes was closed, she added, the area had been under police surveillance and people had been regularly apprehended.

“Every time the authorities arrested a man who was closing a truck door, they had the impression of having dismantled a network,” Boillet said. “In fact, the police had at best arrested two men – that says nothing about a potential network.”

But risk pushes prices up. According to Boillet, the average cost had been around €500 for each person who entered the truck.

They waited until the migrants from the camp were in the parking lot to attack them

“At the end of 2007, beginning of 2008, the Saint-Hilaire area was in the hands of a small group of Sudanese,” Boillet recalled. The Norrent-Frontes camp was their holding area for people waiting their turn to cross. Mostly Eritreans and Ethiopians, penniless and weary of waiting, they knew they were dependent on the smugglers who ran the area.

But a mutiny was brewing.

One day in February 2008, “30 determined people from Calais” arrived at the camp. Shots were fired, but the balance of power turned and the smugglers fled. “The next day, we went back to the camp,” recalled Boillet. The newcomers told us, “we've organised ourselves. We've got the parking lot back and we're going to get everyone through, free of charge.”

And indeed, within a few weeks, most of the people who had been in Norrent-Frontes had crossed into England, “without paying tribute to others”.

“It was at this point that, on the volunteer side, we started talking about ‘door closers’ rather than ‘smugglers’“, Boillet said. Once in the UK, “people would call to inform those who had stayed in Norrent-Fontes, and word would then spread to Calais for others to try their luck from the Saint-Hilaire area.”

According to Boillet, door closers would stay for a few weeks before jumping in themselves, leaving a replacement in their stead. The “self-managed” operation lasted until 22 July 2008, the night of the pancake evening when Hamid was killed. That night, the smugglers who had been evicted five months earlier returned.

“There were several of them: Sudanese but also a Chadian, and they waited until the migrants from the camp were in place in the parking lot to attack them,” Boillet said, citing testimonies she collected after the fact.

People panicked and ran. “The attackers managed to isolate a small group, including Mansour [Hamid],” she said. Blows rained down, a knife was pulled, and Hamid collapsed. He was stabbed, Boillet said, “at heart level”.

The aftermath

“It was a shock, a shock for the entire camp,” Delannoy said. The next day, he and some volunteers opened the doors of the Norrent-Fontes church for the migrants to meet and talk.

“We also organised a vigil at the church, despite the fact that Mansour [Hamid] was Muslim,” he said. “[His death] was significant.”

Hamid was buried two weeks later in Lens. “[His] relatives came from England to attend the ceremony,” Delannoy said.

Two men were put on trial in January 2012. The perpetrator of the fatal blow was sentenced to ten years in prison. The other was acquitted of “violence as part of a group resulting in unintended death”, but was sentenced to four years' imprisonment for aggravated violence.

During the hearing, defence lawyers said what happened was “a brawl that got out of hand”, and “nothing more or less than regular ethnic rivalries”. Boillet is still bitter about that description.

“Mansour [Hamid]'s murder was reduced to a brawl between black people,” she said, “but it was a punitive expedition to recover a crossing point.”

A second death

Eight years after Hamid’s death, Norrent-Fontes was the scene of a second homicide. Mohamed El Sarag, a 26-year-old from Sudan, was killed there on 18 October 2016.

“He had been excluded from the camp by the smugglers following an argument,” explained Nathalie Perlin, a volunteer at Terre d'errance. “He went to Calais for two weeks, then returned to the Norrent-Fontes camp without asking permission.”

He then went to the Saint-Hilaire area to attempt the passage. “The smugglers held a grudge,” Perlin said. “They started beating him because he had disobeyed.”

El Sarag was beaten into a coma and left to die in a field. Emergency services got him to the hospital while he was still breathing, but he couldn’t be saved.

Barely a few hours after the death was announced, the Pas-de-Calais prefecture stated that the murder was the result of a “fight between around 50 Sudanese and Eritrean migrants in an alcoholic state”. The deputy public prosecutor even spoke of “a hundred people beating each other up”.

Migrant rights groups dispute that characterisation. “Analysing this murder in terms of ‘community’ or ‘inter-ethnic’ brawls is too easy an explanation,” said a joint press release co-signed by several associations. “It forgets that policies of closure and non-acceptance force people to live in deplorable conditions and throw them into the hands of unscrupulous people.”

Two Eritreans were sentenced to 12 years in prison for El Sarag’s death in 2020.

In February 2017, a nameplate in several languages was installed at the entrance to the path leading to the Norrent-Fontes camp, to pay tribute to El Sarag. “Not everyone in the camp was in favour of this idea, but it seemed important to us,” said Perlin. “It was a message for the smugglers, and for the government. Someone died here and it’s not normal.”

The people living in Norrent-Fontes camp were expelled in September 2017. The barracks, makeshift shelters and tents were all destroyed, and the nameplate also disappeared.

“It feels like no one ever lived here,” said Perlin. And that no one ever died there.

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