Lorries drive along a protection fence, preventing access to a circular road leading to the port of Calais. PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP
The story of the youngest-ever refugee killed trying to enter UK from Calais should be made into a movie. It would change people’s minds about the topic overnight.
The fifteen-year-old Afghan boy – who cannot be named until his family in Afghanistan are officially informed of his death – was trying to stow away on a lorry in Calais.
He was technically eligible to receive asylum in the UK but the paperwork had been taking a long time to come through.
Paperwork. Government code for “deliberately dragging our feet to avoid our legal responsibilities and pander to sick, anti-refugee sentiment”.
He was out with his cousin, a 17-year-old refugee staying in the same camp, in the early hours of Friday morning. The two boys managed to climb onto the roof of a lorry. Witnesses said the driver noticed them and swerved from left to right to knock them off.
We ask: How is that not murder?
The youngest boy was thrown to the ground, in the path of oncoming traffic. Witnesses told Care4Calais.org he was run over three or four times. It’s also been reported the drivers didn’t stop to check on him.
Other refugees came to the aid of the boy and police fired tear gas to disperse the crowd. When police noticed the body they called an ambulance, but he was dead by the time it arrived, 15-20 minutes later.
Again: the boy had a legal right to claim asylum in the UK. His brother is already resident in the country so he should have been given permission to join him, but he was fed up of the feet-dragging of the authorities responsible for his papers.
While he waited he was living in squalid conditions and had begun taking matters into his own hands, trying to hide on cross-channel lorries and even creeping onto the axles of vehicles.
The as-yet un-named young boy.
Friends and relatives said he was desperate for an education.
He’d fled Afghanistan months earlier, aged 14, after the Taliban prevented him from attending school and tried to force him to become a suicide bomber.
His father feared for his life and sent him away.
The teenager had already travelled through Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia and Germany. Imagine. A fifteen year old. Imagine he was your son.
“He was a kind boy with a good mind, he was trying to learn English in the camp and hoping to go back to school when he reached the UK,” said Abdul, an Afghan friend from the camp.
Calais-based charities say his death is the 13th this year and he is the third child to have died.
“Every day the British and French governments continue to delay taking appropriate and timely action more and more desperate children and adults gamble with their lives. This senseless loss of life must stop,” said Clare Moseley, founder of Care4Calais.org.
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Well, This Is What I Think 
Oh Yolly, words fail me.
The cowardly behaviour of our government (and the civil service advisors too) is at fault – all they want is to remain in power and raking in money and influence, not just now, but when they ‘retire’ as well.
I’d hope that they would have this death and many others on their consciences, but if this goes to show one thing more than another, their behaviour seems to show that they have no consciences, no morals, no compassion.
God help us all with mackerel-backed people like that at the helm of this country – we are surely heading for the rocks.
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The lack of compassion is distressing.
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