Since 2018, 12 migrants have died trying to reach a mountain town near the French-Italian border. What happened?
By Maëlle Lions-Geollot
Twelve piles of stones lie facing the walls of a citadel that overlooks a steep valley surrounded by snow-capped mountains. At the bottom of the cliff, where the cairns have piled up, the river Durance sits at the base of the mountains to the entrance of Briançon, a small town of 12,000 inhabitants located 15 kilometers from the Italian border, in the southwest of France.
This is where authorities fished out the lifeless body of a man on a cool morning last October. His name was Mahadi Youssef. The autopsy revealed that he drowned. Youssef is the twelfth migrant found dead in the mountains since 2018.
Youssef and three other migrants had walked to the French border from the village of Claviere, in Italy. In the dark of night, as they crossed French territory near Montgenèvre, they encountered border officials who, according to local associations, chased them. Two of the migrants were caught, while Youssef and another companion, whom we’ll call Ahmad, fled the scene.
But without GPS and no knowledge of the steep terrain surrounding them, they got lost in the mountains. Walking in the dark, they suddenly saw lights and got scared. They had inadvertently stepped onto a cliff. Suddenly, Youssef fell off the cliff into the river below. Youssef went silent while Ahmad, who clung to the cliff and hung for hours, cried for help.
His cries were finally heard by hikers, who alerted mountain rescue services. Rescue services found the man in a state of hypothermia several hours later. Shortly after, Youssef’s body was found upstream, near the center of Briançon.
Last February, Refuges Solidaires (‘Solidary Shelter’), an association that provides temporary shelter for migrants and asylum seekers once they’ve crossed into France, built a memorial. When the town hall tore it down, local associations placed piles of rocks in its place, overlooking the Asvelt bridge, where Youssef was last seen alive.
“It’s a symbolic place,” said Isabelle Lorre, coordinator of the Medecins du Monde program in Briançon, which provides medical care for migrants after they cross the border. The city hall’s decision is just another effort to “invisibilize what’s going on,” she said, referring to the many incidents happening near the border.
Since 2017, Briancon, in the Hautes-Alpes region, has become one of the stopping-off points for migrants hoping to reach France, where many apply for asylum. But since 2015, when France reintroduced fixed border controls and later, in 2017, introduced a law that added a 10-kilometer perimeter around the border where police can carry out identity checks, the passage became increasingly difficult as routes shifted northward. In May 2018, the first migrant was found dead.
Between May 2018 and October 2023, 10 bodies were found, and two people are missing. In a third of those cases, police chases are mentioned by testimonies collected by Tous Migrants, a local NGO advocating for migrants. According to the NGO, 27,000 migrants have reached Briançon from the Italian border between 2017 and 2023. According to Lorre, around 30% of migrants reaching France are injured while crossing the border.
Isabelle Lorrehas has been coordinating Medecins du Monde in Briançon for the last three years. Briançon, France, April 2, 2024. Photo by Maëlle Lions-Geollot
Increased risk-taking
Last summer, the Ministry of Interior took several measures to “reinforce” surveillance around the border, including increased gendarmes and police presence and the use of drones and thermal imaging cameras.
But such measures don’t stop migrants from attempting to cross; most try several times before successfully crossing. “The more people try to cross again, the more they take increasing risks,” said Lorre, recalling a family found stuck on a cliff. It was the sixth time they were trying to cross the border.
Emma Lawrence, who works at Refuges Solidaires, welcomes migrants seeking shelter for a few days after crossing the border. “There has been an increase of people showing up here with injuries,” she said, adding that casualties have also risen.
According to Michel Rousseau, co-president of Tous Migrants, a “citizen movement” created in 2015, migration routes have adapted along with militarization. In 2017, around 1,600 migrants—more than half of them minors—crossed the Echelle pass, a mountain pass at 1762m altitude, six kilometers from the Italian border. With the first arrivals came the first accidents.
In March 2016, police refused Mamadou, a 27-year-old Malian refugee, entry at the French border. He tried again with a companion, a Guinean teenager, by crossing the Echelle pass to avoid border controls. They were both wearing light clothing when they were caught in a violent snowstorm. After spending the night outside in sub-zero temperatures and waist-deep snow, Mamadou reached the hospital in Briançon while his companion stayed behind and was saved. Mamadou had both legs amputated after suffering severe frostbite.
The incident was a wake-up call for volunteers, who started searching for migrants in the mountains. Many of them have never been in a mountain environment or seen snow.
Clara, a volunteer at Refuges Solidaires, climbs the mountain to assist migrants making the crossing. "It gives you an idea of how dangerous the route is, even without a police presence. It's still a mountain path, it’s very dangerous when you're not used to crossing it, especially at night, with no lights,” she said.
Refuges Solidaires provides what they call a “safe space” to migrants for a few days before they keep on with their route. Refuges Solidaires, Briançon, France, March 29, 2024. Photo by Maëlle Lions-Geollot
Local associations say that police presence at the French border has been affecting migrants’ journeys and putting their lives at risk. “Because they want to avoid border control, people pass by increasingly difficult and steeper paths or take on longer journeys” said Lorre. “Some of them are scared because it’s the military, which means they have weapons,” explained Lawrence.
One night in February, 2019, Tamimou Derman, a young Togolese man in his twenties, froze to death before reaching Briançon. A driver found him next to the national road and took him to the hospital where he died shortly afterwards.
In August 2023, a mountain biker found the body of Moussa Sidibé, a 19-year-old from Guinea, on an off-the-beaten-track road, culminating at an altitude of 2,565 meters. Michel Rousseau, of Tous Migrants, said he died of exhaustion because he took this road as a diversion to avoid checkpoints.
Dangerous police practices
It is not the increase in police presence at the border that adds risks, said Rousseau, but the police practices. “They’re literally tracking down people on the mountain,” Rousseau, who witnessed several police chases of migrants, said. Some police, he said, use the steep terrain like torrents or cliffs, to “trap people.”
In August 2017, two migrants fell off a cliff about 40 meters high after trying to escape a police check. One of them was disabled for life.
The police sometimes hide to halt migrants, but the surprise effect can scare them and separate them from the rest of the group, said Lawrence. “I have seen people showing up here [to Refuges Solidaires] looking for their kid, their siblings or their parents,” she added.
In June 2021, Mohamed Mahayedin, a 23-year-old Sudanese, was separated from his group after hiding from police and disappeared. He was never found despite days of searching by the rescue services.
A photo showing the photos of missing refugees. Refuges Solidaires, Briançon, France, March 29, 2024. Photo by Maëlle Lions-Geollot
By the end of 2017, associations had already alerted the government that such incidents could become more common. The government did not respond; instead, it sent an additional police squadron to the border in April 2018. That Spring, Blessing Matthew, a 21-year-old Nigerian, disappeared after she was chased by police along the banks of the Durance River, in the hamlet of La Vachette. Her body was found two days later in the river, ten kilometers downstream. Hervé S., a migrant who was with her when she disappeared, claimed she had been chased by police officers until she fell in the river. The gendarmes denied any involvement.
The victim’s sister, Christiana Obie, filed a complaint with the court of Gap, the department’s prefecture, which opened an investigation before dismissing the case in February 2021. A counter-investigation published by Border Forensics in 2022 “brings to light major contradictions between the gendarmes’ statements, which turn out to be impossible in time and space.”
Obie and Tous Migrants filed a suit with the European Court of Human Rights, Europe’s international court that ensures the countries’ compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights, which deemed the case “inadmissible” in a ruling handed down last January. Tous Migrants requested an investigation following each migrant’s death or disappearance to determine the circumstances around the event. All cases were either dismissed or still on stand-by, even those where police chases have been mentioned in testimonies.
To this day, courts never established a connection between police practices and deadly accidents involving migrants. (The French border police (PAF) did not respond to interview requests, nor did the prefect.)
In an interview with Radio France in November 2023, the prefect of the Hautes-Alpes department, Dominique Dufours, denied the associations’ allegations. “All police, gendarmes and dignitaries involved in the fight against illegal immigration take particular care not to intervene in high-risk areas. We are well aware that we're dealing with a complicated terrain, and in addition to the deterrent effect of the mere presence of the police, interventions only take place when we're on secure ground,” said Dufours.
LesTerrasses Solidaires, in Briançon, is where the association Refuges Solidaires welcomes migrants. Refuges Solidaires, Briançon, France, March 29, 2024. Photo by Maëlle Lions-Geollot
As spring blooms and temperatures warm, local associations are worried that arrivals - along with incidents - will increase in the coming weeks. “There’s this constant fear over the potential next deaths,” said Clara. Whenever she passes by the Asveld Bridge, she is reminded of Mahadi’s tragic fate. “For a lot of people in the valley, including migrants, the Asveld bridge now means something,” she says.
Next to the stones, a wooden signpost marks the start of the GR, a popular hiking trail in the Hautes-Alpes that passes over the bridge and is used by thousands of mountain lovers yearly. A message has been written in black felt-tip pen: “REFUGEES WELCOME.”
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