A 17-year-old boy from Afghanistan who was rescued from a sinking dinghy alongside 38 others in a tragedy which killed at least four told authorities that French fisherman ignored their desperate cries for help.

The teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said those on board the vessel in the English Channel could see the dinghy passengers were drowning but ‘did nothing’.

The boy, whose uncle in Iran had paid people-smugglers 1,500 euros for him to make the illicit crossing from Calais in the early hours of December 14 last year, told police their boat, overcrowded with 46 people, appeared to ‘explode’.

The evidence was heard during the trial of boat pilot Ibrahima Bah, 19, who denies four counts of manslaughter and one count of facilitating a breach of UK immigration law by piloting the ill-fated small boat.

The dinghy had already been taking on water and one passenger was so scared he had performed last rites, Canterbury Crown Court, Kent, heard.

But the teen said the African driver of the home-built craft reassured them they would be saved if they continued into English waters.

In a police video-recorded interview played today in court, he described how the treacherous journey turned to tragedy.

‘Water was pouring into our boat. We knew that we were going to go down and there were French fishermen circling us, looking at us, ignoring us and doing nothing,’ he said, assisted by a Dari interpreter.

‘They could see we were dying and going down and they were doing nothing. We were still in French waters.

‘The African was saying: “It’s not very serious, we can still get to the other (English) boats where they could help us because these ones are looking and letting us die but we can get there”.

‘There was water everywhere and we were screaming, shouting and saying “We are going down”.

‘We kept screaming and asking: “Help, help, help”, but they were coming and looking and saying “No” and just going away.

‘The guy who was controlling the engine was trying to reassure us, saying: “Don’t panic, stay calm, we will do something. These guys are not doing anything but we can get to the other boats and they might help us”.’

The boy said they were ‘some distance’ into the crossing and described being in ‘no-man’s land’ as one Afghani tried to bail out the water.

But he told police he and the 45 others were ‘packed in’ the boat, which then collapsed into itself under the extra weight.

The 17-year-old said how the inflatable ring ‘exploded’ because there were ‘too many’ people on board. 

A total of 39 people were eventually rescued by an English fishing boat, the Arcturus, assisted by HMS Severn, lifeboat crews and the air ambulance.

The boy did not have a life vest and said he could feel himself losing sensation in his body as he held onto a rope in the icy water before being pulled onboard.

Bah, 19, was among those rescued. He faces four charges of manslaughter in relation to the four men who drowned. One has been identified as Hajratullah Ahmadi while the others remain unknown.

The court heard he accepts he drove the boat but denies all five offences.

At the start of his trial, jurors were told Bah allegedly joked to one passenger: ‘I will either take you there or kill you all’.

He later told police he had been assaulted and threatened into taking control of the inflatable in return for free travel by the Kurdish agents in charge of the human trafficking operation.

Those on board had paid thousands to make the trip, one as much as 8,000 euros, the court heard.

But prosecutor Duncan Atkinson said despite being untrained and unlicensed to pilot a boat, by law Bah had a duty of care to his passengers and that his actions amounted to manslaughter by gross negligence.

He said the risks of such a ‘a home-built inflatable made from low quality materials’ being put to sea were ‘present and obvious’.

‘The inflatable carried with it an obvious and serious risk to the life and limb of each of those on board,’ Mr Atkinson told the court.

‘Whilst the defendant, like the others, was a migrant seeking a better life in the UK, he had also, like those others, voluntarily consorted with the agents of organised crime who profited from that quest.

‘More than that, he accepted, in return for a free crossing, responsibility for his fellow passengers.’

The small craft, just 25 to 28ft in length, was neither ‘typically designed nor manufactured’ to undertake a journey in what is the world’s busiest shipping lane, said the prosecutor.

There was insufficient lifejackets, no safety equipment such as flares or a radio, no deckboards and was being navigated without lights and by mobile phone.

It was also carrying more than double its maximum passenger capacity of 20.

The Afghani teenager told police he had been in a Jungle camp in Dunkirk for about six weeks when he made the crossing, the court heard.

He had left his home in Afghanistan about 18 months earlier and reached France via Austria and Switzerland.

But he said he wanted to reach the UK to study and ‘make a better life’.

The crossing in December last year was his second by boat in a month, the first having failed when they got lost after spending 13 hours at sea.

He described how three Kurdish men drove the migrants in vehicles to the beach at about 1am, inflated the boat and then ordered them to carry it to the water.

The court heard they were punched, kicked and beaten for not hurrying up.

One of those beaten was an African, said the teenager.

‘This was human trafficking so you have to follow their instructions because if you don’t follow or fall behind or are slow, they beat you up,’ he explained.

Once the boat was in the water, the migrants scrambled for a position.

‘There wasn’t any space to move. All 46 were packed, squeezed to fit into that,’ added the boy.

He said the Kurds got the engine going and the inflatable set off.

Asked who controlled the engine during the crossing, he told police ‘one of the Africans’ but he never spoke to him personally.

‘Everyone was thinking of themselves. Everyone was praying to make it with our lives,’ said the boy.

He added that the agents had decided who was to drive, something the Afghanis would ‘shy away’ from.

‘They don’t give us any safety instructions on what to do or how to do things. Any instructions would have been given to the driver,’ he said.

The teen also told police it was ‘common knowledge’ that once in British waters migrants would be rescued, regardless of whether they were drowning or not.

Asked if the driver had any assistance from others on the boat he said: ‘They (the Kurds) would have given him which direction to take. There were other Africans there but I didn’t see any working as his deputy or helping him or assisting him.’

Jurors at Canterbury Crown Court were previously told to put any ‘bias, emotion, sympathy and prejudice’ aside while deciding the case. 

New York is sinking fast and new research reveals that real estate developers’ ‘bigger is better’ ethos is the cause.

A team from the US Geological Survey and the University of Rhode Island found that the weight of the city’s giant skyscrapers is causing the five boroughs to sink one-to-two millimeters yearly.

The team analyzed the weight of 1,084,954 buildings constructed across a 302-square-mile city, including over 6,000 skyrises – 247 of which are skyscrapers over 150 feet tall.

 As these behemoths push the ground beneath them closer and closer to sea level, climate change is raising the ocean to meet them. 

While a few millimeters might not sound catastrophic, some parts of the city are subsiding much faster, keeping pace with the fastest rates that Earth’s tectonic plates are known to move.

‘It can be exacerbated with storm-forcing,’ geologist and study coauthor Tom Parsons of the US Geological Survey told Dailymail.com. 

‘Obviously, we’ve had some events in New York City with hurricanes coming in.’

A sinking city and rising ocean tides, Parsons said, will put New York at greater risk of becoming inundated with flood waters the next time a hurricane like Sandy or Ida rages up the Atlantic coast.  

‘That’s where a lot of the inundation risk comes from,’ Parsons said. 

‘Not necessarily that the island will be completely submerged — at least not anytime soon. 

‘But when you have these extreme events, you can start seeing inundation.’

Parsons and his colleagues said that they are, in fact, likely underestimating the severity of the situation, as their research did not consider the burden of other heavy features like asphalt roads, concrete sidewalks, railways, or the rest of New York City’s infrastructure.

Last year, some of the study’s University of Rhode Island coauthors listed the Big Apple alongside 98 other coastal cities around the world that are also sinking under the weight of their majestic skylines.  

In most of the cities they surveyed, the land below is receding faster than sea levels are rising due to climate change — the dangerous combination that threatens residents with greater flood risks sooner than predicted by today’s climate models.

For this new study, the scientists first calculated the total mass of New York’s one-million-plus buildings: 764,000,000,000 kilograms or 1.68 trillion pounds. 

By examining all that weight, parceled across a grid of 100-by-100-meter squares, the team was able to convert building mass into a clear measurement of the downward force pressing down on the bedrock below the city. 

They then compared this work against satellite imagery capable of measuring changes in land surface height, mapping those readings over their citywide estimates to vet their model against real-world data. 

Another absent factor, they said, that could even more rapidly worsen the problem is the draining and pumping of groundwater, which could essentially assist the pressure coming down from the buildings to further compact the dirt and rock below.

‘The point of the paper,’ writes Parsons at USGS and his colleagues at the University of Rhode Island, ‘is to raise awareness that every additional high-rise building constructed at coastal, river, or lakefront settings could contribute to future flood risk.’

New digital scans released today show the famous RMS Titanic in greater detail than ever before since she sank more than a century ago. 

Experts took thousands of digital images to create the stunning 3D reconstruction of the wreck, which lies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, around 350 nautical miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. 

They present the wreck almost as if it’s been retrieved from the water, although this will likely never happen as the wreck is so fragile that it would disintegrate at the slightest touch. 

Titanic’s delicate remains – which are being eaten away by microbial life and hit with deep ocean currents – are deteriorating so rapidly underwater that the ship could completely disappear within the next 40 years.

Here, MailOnline compares the eerie new images of Titanic with how she looked before hitting that iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912 – a tragedy that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,500 people, including children. 

Experts hope studies of the new scans could reveal more about the mysteries surrounding what happened on the fateful night in April 1912, such as the exact mechanics of how it struck the seafloor. 

‘There are still questions, basic questions, that need to be answered about the ship,’ Titanic analyst Parks Stephenson told the BBC.

‘[The model is] one of the first major steps to driving the Titanic story towards evidence-based research – and not speculation.’

Mr Stephenson said he was ‘blown away’ when he first saw the scans, which were taken by deep-sea mapping company Magellan Ltd during an expedition last summer and which will be the subject of a documentary by Atlantic Productions. 

‘It allows you to see the wreck as you can never see it from a submersible, and you can see the wreck in its entirety, you can see it in context and perspective,’ Mr Stephenson said.

‘And what it’s showing you now is the true state of the wreck.’

Titanic broke in half just before it made its final plunge in the early hours of April 15, 1912, and now two parts of the ship – the bow and the stern – lie 2,600 feet apart.

Both halves are surrounded by a field of debris consisting of bits of metal, pieces of furniture, unopened champagne bottles and even passenger shoes. 

Magellan Ltd sent submersibles to survey all parts of the wreck, which lies around 13,000 feet under the water’s surface. 

The submersibles spent more than 200 hours taking 700,000 images of every angle of the ship to create the 3D reconstruction. 

Deep-sea mapping of the ship makes it appear as if it has drained of all the water, making it easier to see what’s left in clearer detail compared with cameras and lights. 

Images show the stern – the back of the ship – as a twisted mess of metal after it hit the ocean floor still rotating in a counter-clockwise direction. 

The V-shaped bow is more recognisable, complete with railings, although much of it is buried under mud due to the force of impact. 

Mr Stephenson said we still ‘really don’t understand’ everything about Titanic’s collision with the iceberg, so the new images could help reveal more. 

‘We don’t even know if she hit it along the starboard side, as is shown in all the movies – she might have grounded on the iceberg,’ he said.

While some shipwrecks have been brought to land, it’s likely this will never happen with Titanic.

Experts think it is too delicate to be moved due to deterioration from corrosion, biological activity and deep ocean currents. There would be moral implications, too. 

British Titanic survivor Eva Hart, who lost her father to the disaster, said shortly before her death in 1996: ‘I hope severely that they will never attempt to raise part of it. 

‘I do hope they will remember this is a grave – a grave of 1,500 people who should never have died, and I don’t think you should go down there and rob graves and I’m very much opposed to it.’ 

Following years of salvage proposals and unsuccessful expeditions, Titanic’s wreck was finally located on September 1, 1985, more than 73 years after the sinking, by US oceanographer Robert Ballard. 

The discovery, which made headlines across the world, offered proof that the ship split in two before it hit the ocean floor. 

Ballard returned as part of a three-person crew the following year, which returned haunting and grainy footage taken by a remotely-operated underwater exploration vehicle called Jason Junior. 

Back in 2019, an expedition to Titanic provided the first ever 4K images of the ruin and discovered the extent of deterioration due to salt corrosion and metal-eating bacteria. 

Scientists said the microbial life was eating away at the wreck, including the captain’s bathtub, which had completely disappeared, and the hull near the officers’ quarters on the starboard side of the ship, which started to collapse.