A few hours before his death, Abdullah Dilsouz was playing cricket with other child refugees in the wasteland behind the port of Calais, reports The Guardian.
Friends said he was excited to be nearing the end of a long journey from Afghanistan, and optimistic that he would soon be able to join his brother in London.
But the 15-year-old was run over by a refrigeration truck on December 22nd – one of three asylum-seekers to be killed on the roads outside the port in the past month. A fourth has been seriously injured and remains in a coma in hospital and on Sunday night an Iraqi refugee had his legs severed by a train near Dunkirk.
Charities say the deaths are the result of worsening living conditions for migrants in northern France, prompting them to take more risks as they try to reach the UK.
As the French president, Emmanuel Macron, travels to Calais on Tuesday to discuss the re-emerging refugee population with charities and local officials before a summit with Theresa May on Thursday, the dire conditions in which about 80 unaccompanied child asylum-seekers are living is again high on the political agenda.
French media say Macron plans to ask May to allow in unaccompanied children and adults with family in the UK, and demand more money to help in managing the migrant crisis in northern France.
The death of Abdullah, who had a legal right to come to the UK under family reunification legislation, made few headlines in France where migrant deaths have become routine (there have been more than 200 since 1999). But it triggered profound anguish among the local charities that were trying to help him to safety.
The charity Safe Passage has launched a petition calling on the French and British governments to ensure that there are no more deaths at the border. They hope that ministers at the Anglo-French summit this week will agree to speed up asylum processes and make safe and legal routes for child refugees travelling to the UK more accessible.
Jan Agha, 21, was with Abdullah, his cousin, on the night he died. Both came from a small village in Nangarhar province, a unsettled area of eastern Afghanistan where the Taliban and Islamic State have been vying for control.
After a long journey across Europe, neither had any money to pay people smugglers to help them get across the Channel, so every night they were trying to make their way independently, waiting near motorway junctions close to the port, hoping that lorries would slow down sufficiently for them to take a chance to climb on and conceal themselves.
“There is no safe way to do it; it is really dangerous every time you try,” Agha said, speaking through an interpreter. “That night neither of us much wanted to walk to the motorway – we were exhausted. But it was cold in the woods where we were sleeping, so we decided to try again.”
Abdullah was walking along the road behind his cousin. Sometime after 11pm Agha turned to check the boy was still following him and saw him being hit by a lorry travelling very fast towards the port. The driver did not stop, but the truck dragged the 15-year-old along the road for about 100 metres. When Agha found the body of his cousin, he passed out from the shock.
Someone called the police, but the driver has not been found. Agha spent a few hours in hospital and gave details of the incident to the police, before returning to sleep in a tent in the woods. He is so traumatised by the experience that he has abandoned his own attempts to travel to the UK and hopes to claim asylum in France. But the process of registering is not easy and, in the meantime, he continues to be harassed by local police who recently sprayed teargas at him as he slept.
Every few days police arrive at the woods, a few hundred metres from the site of the old camp, which was demolished in October 2016. The officers ask the several hundred people from Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia and Afghanistan who are living in the woods to move on. Refuse collectors remove tents and sleeping bags.