Almost all the victims of the mass Channel drowning last month have now been identified, France has said.

       The Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau confirmed that the French authorities know the identities of 26 of the 27 bodies recovered from the sea when a boat capsized in the waters off Calais on 24 November.

       In total, at least 17 men and seven women - aged between 19 and 46 - and three children lost their lives that day, in what the French interior minister Gerald Darmanin described as the worst-ever disaster involving migrants in the Channel.

       Only two people on board the flimsy dinghy, which was heading to England at the time, survived.

       Investigators found that the majority of the deceased were from Iraqi Kurdistan, including a seven-year-old girl, a teenager and four women.

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       The other known victims came from countries including Afghanistan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and Somalia, according to Ms Beccuau.

       Just days after the disaster, Maryam Nuri Mohamed Amin, a Kurdish student from northern Iraq who was in her early 20s, became the first victim to be named.

       Her relative Krmanj Ezzat Dargali confirmed her death to the BBC and the Times and paid tribute to Maryam as a “beautiful angel” in a Facebook post.

       She had been attempting to travel to Britain to live with her fiance.

       Maryam’s death was followed by a report in the Observer that four family members from Iraqi Kurdistan also died in the accident. The newspaper named the mother as Khazal Hussein, 45, and her two daughters as Hadia and Hasti, 22 and seven, and her son as Mubin, 16.

       The disaster came after the number of migrant boats crossing from France to the UK tripled from 2020 to 2021.

       Responding to the mass drowning, both Britain and France accused the other of failing to prevent people from attempting the dangerous route.

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       As part of this friction, the French government revoked an invitation for home secretary Priti Patel to attend a meeting of European ministers in Calais in late November.

       Over the Channel tragedy, Boris Johnson said at the time that he was “shocked, appalled and deeply saddened” by the deaths.