TIMES INVESTIGATION

‘Traffickers are like mafia: they’ll kill you or your family’

Border Force brings a group of people thought to be migrants into Dover harbour
Border Force brings a group of people thought to be migrants into Dover harbour
GARETH FULLER/PA

Two days after a family of five died at sea trying to reach England, Haval, a 15-year-old migrant, was queueing for a food handout in a muddy camp in a wood in northern France and thinking of taking the same risky journey.

“Of course I know it’s dangerous to get a boat to England,” said the teenager, who has travelled alone from his Kurdish region of Iran on a journey organised by people smugglers and financed by his family back home.

“But what else can I do? Look how we live here,” he said, pointing to the sodden clearing in the Puythouck woods in Grande-Synthe near Dunkirk where 300 or so migrants from Iran and Iraq live in shelters made of blue tarpaulins.

Haval said