French coastguard crews have rescued 157 people from a boat after it caught fire in the English Channel.
Three coastguard ships carried out the rescue and returned the passengers to the port of Boulogne, local officials said.
Five people had been rescued from the same boat a few hours earlier by coastguard personnel.
Refugee charity Utopia 56 said eight British and French rescue boats were sent to French waters off Boulogne to take part in the rescue.
Among them was a Royal National Lifeboat Institution vessel, which was sent from Eastbourne on the south coast of England at about 6am.
“A small boat caught fire at the border between French and British waters, leading its occupants to jump into the water,” said a spokesman for France's maritime prefecture.
A fuel leak from the boat's outboard motor is believed to have caused the blaze.
After the first five passengers were rescued, "the remaining people on board refused the assistance offered by the French patrol boats", the spokesman said.
At that stage it was decided not to intervene further due to the "structural fragility" of boats used to cross the Channel.
But after the engine caught fire this morning the "vessel's integrity deteriorated very rapidly".
The rescue comes day after British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said his Labour government would be "relentless" in reducing the number of people crossing the Channel to the UK on small boats.
Four asylum seekers died trying to cross the Channel in two separate incidents last week.
In one incident, three women suffered heart attacks after their boat was launched off the coast of Dunkirk, northern France.
A second boat sank off the coast of the French seaside town of Neufchatel-Hardelot, leading to the death of a man.
The women, aged between 20 and 50, were taken ashore by French emergency services, but attempts to resuscitate them failed, and all three were declared dead.
They were on board a so-called taxi boat, one of several operated by human-trafficking gangs that are sailed along the coast to pick up people at designated spots before attempting to cross the Channel.
So far this year, 13,748 have completed the crossing - about 45 per cent lower than this time last year. However, the average number of passengers to a boat has been rising.
This has been attributed to French authorities intercepting boats and disrupting the supply of their components, prompting traffickers to force more people on to each vessel to maintain their profits.
