A Paris court on Wednesday found six men from Iraq and Afghanistan guilty of manslaughter over the drowning of 31 migrants on an overcrowded dinghy five years ago in the English Channel.Seven other men, including a Pakistani national, were found guilty of lesser smuggling charges, including facilitating illegal immigration as part of an organised gang and criminal conspiracy. Two, who had cut ties with smugglers before their arrest, were granted the authorisation to serve their sentence at home with electronic tags.Lawyer Emmanuel Daoud, who represented one of the victims' family members, told The National he was “satisfied” with the court's efforts at determining the involvement and responsibility of each defendant in the largest single drowning incident in the Channel.“If you traffic in human distress and vulnerability, if you deliberately take the risk of endangering people's lives by putting them in a makeshift boat, you cannot – the next day or the day after – claim that no one is responsible,” Mr Daoud said. “That was the position of most of the defendants.”The court sentenced several of the defendants to pay €9,000 ($10,200) compensation to his client and her two children. Their father, who was from Ethiopia, drowned the night the dinghy capsized in November 2021. The victims were mainly Iraqi Kurds, but also included Afghans, Ethiopians, an Egyptian, a Somali natio...
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