Lost for Words

The remains of  two men were washed up on North Sea beaches about 350 miles apart – in the Netherlands and Norway,

Their identities remained a mystery until a worldwide appeal found they had bought identical wetsuits from a sports shop in the French port of Calais.

Relatives of two Syrian men who had gone missing in France for months contacted a Norwegian newspaper which paid for DNA tests to establish the identities of the two, in their twenties.

Mouaz Al Balkhi and Shadi Omar Kataf were known to have fled their country's civil war last year and had made their way across Asia and Europe with the intention to seek a new life in Britain.

They purchased wetsuits together on October 7 at Calais sports retailer Decathlon, along with hand paddles, snorkels and diving masks.

Soon after Mr Balkhi, an electrician from Damascus, was found washed up on the Dutch island of Texel.

The remains of Mr Kataf, who had fled a refugee camp in territory controlled by ISIS, were only discovered in January on Lista in the south of Norway.

The pair were finally linked when an appeal for information through Interpol by Norwegian police provided a match on the basis of the identical wetsuits.

Analysis of the chip sewn in the labels then traced them to the store in Calais.

The plight of the two Syrians, whilst tragic, serves to illustrate the increasing risks that migrants are willing to take to reach Britain after fleeing persecution and war.

(sourced from The Daily Mail, Dover Express, BBC World Service 2015)