More body parts found washed up on Texel beach

Another body part was recently found on the beach of Texel. After a local beachcomber found trousers with bone remains inside last week, another resident of the island found a shoe with a foot still in it last weekend, NH Nieuws reported on Thursday.

Texel is the largest of the five Dutch Wadden Islands that band the northern coast of the Netherlands.

A resident from de Koog, a village located on the North Sea coast of the island, found a shoe on a beach on Sunday morning. “I saw that there was still a bone in it. In a sock. I was astonished. It was clearly a foot, whole and intact,” the woman told the local broadcaster. The police asked the Netherlands Forensic Institute to identify the bones.

This discovery comes after local beachcomber Maarten Brugge told NL Times last week he increasingly comes across items that seem to belong to refugees. He recently found one life jacket, several backpacks, a toothbrush, and clothes.

Brugge said he believes that these items likely belonged to people who attempted to cross the English Channel from France to England on small boats. British government figures show that more than 100,000 migrants have been detected crossing the Channel on small boats in the past five years. Roughly 25,000 migrants were detected in 2023 as of 3 October.

When these boats capsize or leak, they are carried northward by currents and, with westerly winds, towards the Dutch coast, often ending up on the Wadden Islands.