Six dead after migrant boat sinks in Channel

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Six people have died after a boat carrying migrants sank in the Channel, off the French coast.

The French coast guard said the vessel got into difficulty in the sea near Calais in the early hours of Saturday.

Fifty-nine people - many of them Afghans - were rescued by French and British coastguards, officials said. But the search for two people who may still be missing has been called off.

Some people were seen being brought off a lifeboat in Dover on stretchers.

The extent of injuries remain unclear and the exact numbers of those rescued changed during the day as more information was released.

The six people who died were Afghan men thought to be in their 30s, the AFP news agency reported Philippe Sabatier, deputy public prosecutor for the French coastal city of Boulogne, as saying.

He said those rescued included some children and were mostly from Afghanistan, although there were some Sudanese.

The French coastal authority Premar said a passing ship first raised the alarm at around 04:20 local time that an overloaded boat was in difficulty off the coast of Sangatte.

When the French lifeboat arrived, they found people in the sea, with some screaming for help.

The Dover lifeboat, which was already in the Channel dealing with another boat carrying migrants, joined the rescue operation at 05:50.

One of the volunteer rescuers told the Reuters news agency migrants were using shoes to bail water out of the sinking boat.

Anne Thorel said there had been "too many" people on board.

Another French rescuer, Jean-Pierre Finot, said: "Some were suffering from sea sickness and the boats are quite simply overloaded... [and] can no longer move forward".

Rescue crews say this is the seventh time this week that they have had to pull people from the water, raising concerns that the smugglers organising the crossings may be using a defective batch of boats.