Migrant boat pilot loses bid to appeal sentence

An asylum seeker who piloted a boat in the English Channel where four passengers drowned has lost his bid to challenge his convictions and sentence.

Ibrahima Bah was convicted of manslaughter and of facilitating a breach of UK immigration law and sentenced to nine and a half years' detention in February, after steering the dinghy in an attempted crossing on 14 December, 2022.

During a retrial at Canterbury Crown Court, Bah said smugglers threatened to kill him if he did not drive the boat, but the prosecution said he was not telling the truth.

At the Court of Appeal earlier, the Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr said Bah could not bring the appeal, ruling it was not "arguable".

Richard Thomas KC, for Bah, previously described his trial as "touching on a highly politicised issue which gives rise to very strong feelings".

Jurors heard the home-built, low-quality inflatable dinghy should have had no more than 20 people on board, but carried about 45 people in the English Channel that night.

Mr Thomas told the Court of Appeal it had been a "joint endeavour" to travel to the UK.

He said the passengers made the journey "knowing the risks involved".

However, Baroness Carr dismissed this argument, adding: "The judge correctly analysed that the fact that the deceased volunteered to join the boat could not establish a break in the chain of causation; the evidence to that effect was thus irrelevant to causation."

She also ruled that the trial judge gave the right directions to the jury, stating: "An instruction to the jury inviting them to consider whether the fact that the deceased boarded the boat of their own free will broke the chain of causation would have amounted to a misdirection."

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) opposed the appeal bid.

Duncan Atkinson KC, for the CPS, previously said: "This is a case where the passengers on the boat were acting in concert with their pilot."

He added: "It was not the background or the scene setting, it was the continued act of facilitation at the time of their deaths which provided the circumstances in which the deaths occurred."

The judge previously sentenced Bah, a Senegalese national, on the basis he was about 20 years old.

Thirty-nine survivors were brought to the Port of Dover after a UK fishing boat came across the sinking dinghy.

They were helped by the RNLI, air ambulance and UK Border Force.

Three of those who died were known only as unknown male persons.

The fourth person was named as Hajratullah Ahmadi, a 31-year-old man who had come from Afghanistan.

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