The parents whose seven-year-old daughter was crushed to death aboard a crowded migrant boat have celebrated the birth of a new baby, one year after the tragedy.
The Alhashemi family has given up their bid of living in Britain and are instead looking forward to permanently settling in France after being granted permission to remain for the next four years.
In April 2024, Sara was one of five people who died in a suffocating crush on a packed inflatable dinghy making its way across the Channel to the UK from the shores of Wimereux, south of Calais.
She was travelling with her mother, Nour, 14-year-old sister, Rahaf, nine-year-old brother, Hussam and father, Ahmed, when a rival group of migrant men rushed onboard.
Ahmed, 42, found himself jammed inside the boat and unable to move, losing grip of Sara as she became trapped beneath his legs in the dark.
He and his wife, 35, had fled from Iraq 14 years prior after being threatened by the militia.
They got married and had three children in Belgium, before moving the family to Sweden where they lived for seven years and where Sara went to school and knew the language.
But after multiple failed applications for asylum in EU countries, the Alhashemi family made a fourth and fatal attempt to cross the Channel, leading to Sara’s death.
Over a year on from the tragedy on April 23 in northern France, it seems like life for the Alhashemi family is finally looking brighter after unimaginable loss.
In late July, Ahmed – who had been consumed with guilt following the death of his youngest child – received a long-awaited email from French authorities granting him provisional asylum.
Once Nour receives the same news – which she has been told will arrive soon – they will be able to apply for permanent residency, clearing the path towards French citizenship.
Not only that, but Nour has recently given birth to a healthy baby girl, Sally, whose name deliberately recalls the beloved child they buried in a cemetery in the city of Lille.
‘It means I can see Sara in her,’ Nour told the BBC, wiping away a tear while sitting in their two-bedroom apartment in a social housing unit in Rouvroy. ‘God willing, Sally will be lucky in life and achieve everything that Sara might have done.’
The mother had worried it was ‘too soon’ for another baby, but the birth has given the whole family a new sense of optimism as they continue to mourn Sara.
To honour the memory of her little sister, Rahaf set up a ‘shrine’ dedicated to Sara’s memory on a bookcase in the flat, fit with photographs and carefully selected mementoes, including her watch.
Speaking in the wake of her death to the BBC, a distraught Ahmed said he would never forgive himself for losing hold of Sara’s hand amid the stampede, after people smugglers crammed more than 100 migrants onto the dinghy.
‘That time was like death itself. We saw people dying. I saw how those men were behaving. They didn’t care whom they were stepping on – a child, or someone’s head, young or old,’ the father said through tears.
‘I could not protect her. I will never forgive myself. But the sea was the only choice I had.’
Describing the pain of losing his daughter in such horrific circumstances, he told Sky News: ‘I lost my child, I lost my daughter. She was like a butterfly, like a bird, she was everything to us, the light in our home, our source of laughter, she was everything.’
Following her death, Ahmed made a desperate plea to the British government to help the family get legal passage to the UK.
After meeting and falling in love in their 20s in Belgium, Sara’s parents – both from Iraq – made their way to Sweden after the government denied their right to stay in the country.
But at the beginning of 2024, after the three children had all settled in school, the family were told they had to leave Sweden too.
Justifying their repeated rejections of the family’s asylum claims, European officials argued that their home city in Basra, southern Iraq, was safe to return to as it was no longer a warzone.
But Ahmed and Nour refused to be deported back to Iraq, so they made the decision to contact an Iraqi Kurdish smuggling gang and pay them €5,250 (£4,571) to transport the family by small boat to England.
British police detained two suspected smugglers following Sara’s death, who were deemed responsible for packing 112 migrants on the boat at Plage des Allemands beach, causing it to capsize.
They had promised only 40 people would be onboard.
The migrants were told to inflate the boat at 6am and carry it to the shore before running with it to the sea.
But when a police teargas canister exploded near the Alhashemi family, Sara began screaming.
She was on her father’s shoulders, but he had to take her down to assist his other daughter, Rahaf, with getting on the boat.
He begged those around him, including a young Sudanese man who had boarded the dinghy at the last moment, to make some space to allow him to grab Sara to safety.
‘I just wanted him to move so I could pull my baby up,’ Ahmed said. The man ignored the father, then threatened him.
Horrendously overcrowded, the vessel floated a few hundred metres off shore before beginning to capsize, with the ensuing panic causing a stampede which saw Sara trampled to death.
While 49 of the migrants were brought back to the shore or transported to Boulogne after the rescue operation, 58 people continued the journey to Britain accompanied by a French navy ship.
The next few months for the Alhashemi family were defined by hardship.
They were moved to a crowded migrant transit hotel in a village, south of Lille, where there were no shops, a lack of public transport and no financial support.
It was a struggle to get a local school to accept Rahaf and Hussam, who had been happy and settled in Sweden.
A devastated Nour, distraught following her daughter’s death, struggled to leave her bed, describing it as the ‘worst year of my life’.
Recalling the rapid turnover of migrants in the hostel, she said: ‘Whenever new (migrants) arrived, they wanted to talk about the sea, how they got there, who they came with. I didn’t want anyone to ask me questions or to hear anything.’
They applied for asylum in France, but it took months of back and forth negotiation with the authorities to get their case heard – a process made more difficult by the language barrier.
Everything changed in July when the family finally heard some good news after months of uncertainty while living in temporary accommodation.
Now, the Alhashemi family can look towards their future in France with hope that better times are on the horizon.
