Story By: Joseph Golder, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Central European News

An English couple on holiday in France who checked their car’s top box when they heard noises coming from inside found their luggage had vanished – and in its place were two migrants hoping to cross the Channel to England.

The incident took place in France after the two migrants, both minors aged 16 who have not been named but who are said to be from Eritrea and Guinea, climbed inside the luggage compartment while the car was stopped at a hotel in Calais.

They had thought the couple were about to return to England, but the English holidaymakers had only just arrived in France and drove south-east instead.

After hearing strange noises coming from the luggage compartment, they stopped at the Haudricourt rest stop on the A26 motorway in the Seine-Maritime department in the Normandy region of northern France, just after the Aumale toll booths.

The English couple, who have not been named, then opened the luggage carrier and found that all their belongings had disappeared and had been replaced instead by the two teenage migrants.

The teenagers fled the scene, but the tourists phoned the gendarmes, according to French news outlet France Bleu Normandie, and the migrants were found and detained.

The couple explained to the gendarmes that they had travelled across England by car and taken the ferry to Calais.

They said they had stopped at a hotel in Calais to spend the night there before heading to the Vendee department for their holiday.

It was in the hotel car park that the two young people spotted the car, thinking they were dealing with English people who were returning home by ferry the next morning.

So they emptied the trunk of the luggage it contained and hid inside.

The English couple filed a complaint for theft. The two migrants, however, were released after the Aide Sociale a l’Enfance (ASE; a departmental service responsible for caring for children or adolescents from families in difficulty) refused to take them in.

Their current whereabouts are unknown.

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