Migrant freezes to death in French Alps

A young migrant who was found unconscious on the side of the road in the French Alps has died of heart attack and hypothermia, The Local reported.  

The man was attempting to cross the Alps from Italy when a truck driver found him unconscious near the road linking the French Hautes-Alpes and the Italian region of Piedmont at 3:00am on 7 February 2019.  

French border police called an ambulance when they came across the truck driver trying to save the migrant. The 29-year-old man from Togo, identified as Derman Tamimou, was suffering from hypothermia and cardiac arrest when paramedics arrived. According to The Local, he was declared dead at a hospital in the border town of Briançon.

“He was probably among a group of 21 who left the evening before, despite all the warnings given to them by us and Red Cross volunteers about how dangerous the crossing is,” said Paolo Narcisi, president of the charity Rainbow for Africa, speaking to The Guardian.

Heavy snowfall in the first week of January had made the roads and routes in mountains even worse than usual to travel through and the Togolese man was found half covered by snow.

Three migrants died on the Alps in 2018. The first, a Nigerian called Mathew Blessing, was found drowned in the Durance River, not far from Briançon. Two other migrants were soon found dead along the route favoured by migrants. This year, Tamimou is the first person known to have died while attempting to cross the frozen Alps on foot.  

Thousands of young men risk their lives attempting to cross the Alps from Italy dreaming of a better life in France, only to find themselves stranded on the streets of Paris or soon returned to Italy. Many of the migrants pay hundreds of euros to be smuggled by car to France but find themselves abandoned in the Alps at extreme risk to their lives.

Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini accused France of sending back to Italy “more than 60,000 migrants, women and children included, abandoning some of them in the forest at night,” in the last two years. While it is illegal to send back minors, France is not breaking the law by returning people whose first EU landing point was Italy, according to the rules of the Dublin regulation.

TMP – 19/02/2019

Photo caption: Montgenèvre ski resort on the French Hautes-Alpes during winter. Photo credit: Mike Dotta/ Shutterstock