The price of freedom from torture in Iraq: £2,500 each and eight days in a rusty ship's squalid hold

In the early hours of Saturday morning, a rusting freighter dumped a cargo of human misery on picturesque, tree-fringed rocks a few yards from some of the most opulent coastal villas of the south of France.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, a rusting freighter dumped a cargo of human misery on picturesque, tree-fringed rocks a few yards from some of the most opulent coastal villas of the south of France.

The deliberate and cynical shipwreck of the East Sea - carrying 908 Iraqi Kurds, including hundreds of children and old people - has exposed the magnitude of the refugee crisis now facing all the rich countries of Western Europe. The ship's passengers spent eight days at sea in slave-ship conditions, piled against one another in darkness, surrounded by their own excrement. They were fed on biscuits and water; they had no more than the clothes they were wearing. They were occasionally beaten.

They had paid up to $4,000 (£2,500) each for their passage. And yet the nightmare voyage was, to the refugees, a success. The Iraqi Kurds on board the East Sea - who included people in their nineties and three babies born en route - have achieved their ambition. They have reached Western Europe.

Ironically, they were on their way as US and British planes were bombing Iraqi targets last Friday as part of a strategy to protect the Iraqi Kurds in their homeland. "I had to get out of there [Iraq]. There is torture and death there," said Mahmoud, 20, one of a handful of refugees to talk to the press at a military camp near Fréjus yesterday.

Another refugee in his thirties said: "We were kept in the cargo hold. We couldn't tell how long we were in there because it was always dark. We were hungry. It was terrible. Terrible. Now that we are in France, we are very happy." All of the passengers are expected to claim political asylum in France.

Their fate will be decided by the French government in the next three weeks. Much will depend on who exactly they are, which remains something of a mystery. None of them had any identity documents.

The refugees told French frontier police yesterday that they had been "recruited" by an Iraqi criminal gang specialising in smuggling people from villages near the Syrian and Turkish border (nominally under Western protection). They were then smuggled into Turkey in trucks and waited on isolated farms for a ship to arrive. They are believed to have boarded the 880-ton ship - captained and crewed by Iraqis - on the Friday or Saturday of the week before last.

Most of the Kurds smuggled into Western Europe are young or middle-aged men, whose ambition is to reach Britain, and eventually the United States. The two, fetid, dark and airless cargo-holds of the East Sea contained entire, extended families, from old women in their eighties and nineties to small children and babies. One passenger was said to be 100.

"It was horrible. I never want to relive that," said Abdoul Salam, 32, who said he had fled from the Mosul area of northern Iraq. "We had no idea of time. Two or three times we thought the ship would sink."

French authorities fear the wrecking of the East Sea on the Cÿte d'Azur may have been calculated. If so, it may signal a new wave of attempts by Middle Eastern or Balkan "boat people" - or their criminal exploiters - to come ashore directly on the north Mediterranean coast.

The voyages of such boat people usually end in remote coves in southern Italy. The journey of the East Sea was unusual because it ended on one of the most densely populated, and wealthy, shorelines in Europe.

French officials assumed that the Syrian-owned coastal freighter, sailing under a Cambodian flag, had reached the coast near St Raphaël by mistake. It was thought that the captain and crew might have got lost. But there is no doubt that the ship was run ashore deliberately. The rudder was jammed and the engines turned full-on.

Yesterday morning, French coastguards found a lifeboat from the East Sea floating a couple of miles from the scene of the shipwreck.

An attempt had been made to sink the boat. It is assumed that the captain and crew escaped in this boat and were picked up by a second one. "They may have always intended to ground the ship on this coast," a French coastguard official said yesterday.

Refugees have told French investigators that they never saw the faces of the crew. "They would come down into the holds wearing hoods and throw them a bit of food and a few bottles of water," said Daniel Chaz of the French frontier police.

He said the crew spoke to the passengers only in monosyllables, such as "stand", "sit" and "eat". They were packed into two small, airless and unlit cargo holds, designed to carry merchandise, not people. They had to lie on planks, or in some cases, bare iron. There were no toilets; no water for washing. The first police officers and doctors who reached the shipsaid that conditions in the holds were appalling. "There was excrement everywhere. The stench was pestilential," one police officer said.

When the ship was grounded, a few passengers managed to scramble ashore and raise the alarm. The others crowded, in family groups, on to the deck and calmly awaited rescue, looking surprisingly healthy and cheerful after their ordeal. They might have been waiting to disembark from a cross-Channel ferry.

Such desperate voyages are already commonplace further east in the Mediterranean. But this is, perhaps, the first deliberate shipwreck. On New Year's Day, a Georgian-flagged cargo ship, the Pati, carrying over 70 illegal immigrants, sank after hitting rocks off the southern coast of Turkey. More than 40 people are feared to have drowned.

In February last year, a ship called the Davies, believed to be carrying 180 refugees, put out a distress signal 30 miles off Brindisi in southern Italy. But despite a search by the navy, no trace of the ship was found.

Patrick Devedjian, spokesman of President Jacques Chirac's Gaullist RPR party said the passengers of the East Sea should be "made welcome" in France. "What do you want to do with them? Throw them back into the sea?" he asked. François Hollande, of the Socialist party, said they should be treated "with humanity" and then sent home. The government said asylum requests would be treated case by case.