BBC<\/a> interviewer, Michael Keohan, and said: \u201cIs that toward us? I dunno.\u201d<\/p>\nAfter uploading a video of the incident to X, Philp claimed it could have been an attempt to stop coverage of the small boats crisis: \u201cThere was no notice or training exercise in place. Felt like warning shots or attempted intimidation.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Others were sceptical that a French warship would have acted in response to Philp\u2019s interview, or been aware of it. One former senior Border Force officer said: \u201cThere are often exercises at sea involving the Royal or the French navy, and shots are occasionally fired, usually using blanks. This may be nothing at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Keohan described the incident as \u201cthe most unusual moment \u2026 in the quiet of the Channel\u201d. He said he saw a French patrol officer at the back of the boat pointing a pistol toward the sea and believed that was where the shots came from.<\/p>\n
The journalist added: \u201cThere was no warning for our boat, no signs given that this was the French intention. Even now it\u2019s still not clear what the patrol boat was aiming at.\u201d<\/p>\n
The captain of the fishing boat, Matt Coker, said he also believed it was an attempt at intimidation.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a bit strange that as they approached us there wasn\u2019t fire or anything and then as they went past, afterwards there wasn\u2019t fire or anything,\u201d he said. \u201cThey only seemed to be firing the weapons when they were right alongside us. So I find that a bit strange because we\u2019ve got all this open sea out here.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo it sounds like it might have been an effort to intimidate us. It could well have been, it might have just been a little bit of a warning shot. Maybe just a show of force or something.\u201d<\/p>\n
The French embassy and the French coastguard were approached for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Conservative MP has claimed a French warship fired warning shots near a boat he was on in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":715462,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-715461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=715461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715461\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/715462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=715461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=715461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=715461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}