Gangmasters blamed as 19 Chinese cocklers drown in Morecambe Bay

Gangmasters may be responsible for the deaths of 19 Chinese immigrants, including two women, who were engulfed by Morecambe Bay's notorious tides as they engaged in a perilous nocturnal search for cockles.

Gangmasters may be responsible for the deaths of 19 Chinese immigrants, including two women, who were engulfed by Morecambe Bay's notorious tides as they engaged in a perilous nocturnal search for cockles.

Lancashire Police said five of the survivors were unknown to immigration services and nine were asylum-seekers, and indicated that a homicide charge may result from their inquiries.

"We will want to establish who, if anyone, they were working for," said Julia Hodson, an assistant chief constable. If gangmasters were to blame, they would be "criminals of the worst possible kind who are prepared to exploit those who are most vulnerable in society", she added.

The immigrants were enticed to the Red Bank sands near Morecambe by the prospect of easy riches. The bay's high-quality cockles fetch £10 per 50kg bag for the employer and a picker can fill one in an hour. There is said to be £8m-worth of cockles in the bay.

For the past 12 days, the Chinese have been driving across the sand in transit vans and harvesting cockles. Their only obstacles have been a few local residents, antagonised by their presence, who have poured diesel over their pickings and burnt them.

But there were no residents in sight on Thursday afternoon. They knew it was one of the five days in a month when high tides render the sandbanks lethal. It was left to the Chinese, oblivious to the dangers, to take their chances. After grabbing some sleep in vans on the shoreline, up to 34 of them took to the sands at 3.30pm, two hours before dusk.

They worked quickly, tamping the sand with rocking boards and raking out the cockles. They used the light of their vehicle's lamps after dusk, but by 9.30pm the tide was racing in faster than they could run and it engulfed them.

Three helicopters were scrambled and more than 150 people joined the rescue. The first body was found at 2.30am and a rescue hovercraft soon discovered more. "It was a patch of eight, all dead. We were ferrying the bodies back, four a time," said the craft's commander, Harry Roberts, yesterday. "It looked as if something dreadful had happened. There were bodies all over the sandbank." Even his hovercraft found the going tough. Winds were gusting at force six and the sea movement was 45 knots.

The search was complicated by the uncertainty of precisely how many cocklers were out in the bay. By some local estimates, 13 Chinese have a license to pick cockles here, but there were many more than that out in the water.

Yesterday morning, Lancashire police had translators working in several languages with survivors, who were all Chinese mainland nationals apart from two white Europeans.

The last body expected to be found was recovered at 3.30pm yesterday. Items of clothing were still being washed up but residents were asked not to touch them but to contact police.

"It may be very difficult identifying some of them," said Ms Hodson, who is being helped in her task by the Kent Police officers called to identify 58 Chinese found in the back of a container lorry at Dover in June 2000.

To some of the Chinese, the sight of police vehicles was the signal to disappear. At least three workers, including a woman, were seen fleeing the scene in a red car, and two hid in a local farm outhouse. The farmer in whose premises they hid said: "There have also been a lot of dapper Chinese men in suits working around here, all speaking good English. Where were they when all of this happened?"

Despite the horror in the bay, xenophobia was not hard to find in the local village of Hest Bank yesterday. "How much compensation do you reckon they'll get?" joked one resident yesterday. "Well, we joke about the Irish don't we?" he added.

"Some say the Chinese are earning £150 a day," said another. "That's a lot when some people in Morecambe can't get a wage."

It was a reflection of how unwelcome the Chinese intrusion has been on sandbanks that were once the exclusive domain of a few local lads.

Red Bank's appeal has intensified in the past few weeks as other Morecambe Bay beds have been exhausted and the lucrative Dee estuary beds have remained off limits, crippled by an infection in their cockles. When the North West and North Wales Fisheries Committee decided to allocate licences to those seeking to exploit the beds earlier this month, 250 were granted on the first day alone.

On 15 December, there was a warning sign when at least 23 Chinese cocklers were stranded at Aldingham, on the opposite side of the bay. In another incident, two helicopters and a hovercraft came to the rescue of an Aldingham crew, including a number of foreign nationals, who waded to the shore rather than jump into lifeboats. They had no protective clothing except waders.

Local agencies have been aware of the chaos. Geraldine Smith, MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale, was to have chaired a multi-agency meeting on cockling at Morecambe town hall later this month.

The sheer number of agencies involved - 50 in total, from the fisheries committee to the Immigration Service - demonstrates how complex the issue has become.

Yesterday Ms Smith led the call for gangmasters to be apprehended. "I suspect these people were working for a pittance and being exploited by gangmasters," she said. "We have to go after them. We must also close down the cockle beds immediately. This was a tragedy waiting to happen and it must not be repeated."

After appointing a detective superintendent to head the inquiry, Lancashire Police convened a meeting of the Immigration Service, national asylum service and Department of Social Security to help establish the status of the Chinese victims and survivors. It was also liaising with the Chinese embassy.

Meanwhile, dusk began to settle on the beach at Hest Bank and for once the beach was deserted. The only signs of the energetic local industry was a trail of red hessian cockles bags dropped in some cockler's hurry to reach the sands.

There was also the peeling paint of a sign erected by the local council in the days before the cockle rush. "Fast rising tides and hidden channels: in emergency ring 999," it reads.

Those 19 dead cocklers would not have understood a word of it.