The survivor who was with Abdulfatah Hamdallah, the Sudanese refugee who drowned in the Channel in August, has made it safely to the UK after taking the same route. Ahmed Fadol Adam, 21, who said he spent five years enslaved in Libya, travelled with 11 other Sudanese refugees and one Chadian on an inflatable dinghy on 29 September. It was his fifth attempt to reach the UK. “The dream of reaching the UK just held me” Adam told the Guardian. After reaching Dover, the group was sent by the Home Office to Bedford, where they were detained for five days before being transferred to a temporary hotel in central London with dozens of asylum seekers from different countries. “After [Hamdallah’s] drowning I nearly gave up, but a friend who lives in Paris convinced me to try again. He told me that France is not a good place for us, and to be honest I saw countless refused cases including the late Abdulfatah.” After Hamdallah’s death, Adam said he tried to reach the UK four times by different ways; three times he jumped into trucks, but had to jump off the vehicles after discovering that they were not going to the UK. A separate attempt by boat was also unsuccessful “because the two guys with me got really exhausted and one was vomiting and the other one was dizzy, so when a French ship neared us we jumped in and went back to Calais.” Adam has been struggling with sleep, but he refused to see a therapist when he was lying at the hospital in Calais. “Memories,” he said, “Whenever I remember the drowning I can’t sleep. I saw death in front of my eyes.” Originally from west Darfur state, he recalls spending some of his childhood years at slums around Gazera agricultural scheme in central Sudan, helping his farmer father and learning to swim at the creeks of the Blue Nile river. “Learning how to swim back then helped me to survive. Abdulfatah couldn’t swim.” When their boat capsized, Hamdallah disappeared under a strong wave. “I didn’t see him after that.” Adam swam to the Sangatte coast, where he met some fishermen who called the police, and he was taken to a hospital. Another Sudanese asylum seeker told the Guardian that most of the refugees in France do not have money, so they “steal” boats from local fishermen. “That’s our only chance,” Adam said. Adam left Sudan at the age of 16 after the 2013 conflict around Geneina, the capital of west Darfur state. He said he spent five years in Libya, where he was enslaved in Al-Kufra and Ajdabiya cities in eastern Libya, before his family paid for his freedom. “We were around 49 Sudanese people who were sold by one man to another. I was beaten and my left knee was broken by his bodyguards who were just like us, they had been enslaved and their relatives could not pay for their freedom, so they became bodyguards for the Libyan smugglers. “I was lucky, some others were tortured in a really bad way, they poured oil on their backs.” Adam’s family had to borrow money from different people to free him, he said. After his release, Adam met a Sudanese man in Ajdabiya and plastered his knee using local methods. He got a job as an assistant builder before becoming a sheep herder outside the town. He often didn’t get paid, he said, so once he earned some money he traveled to Bani Walid in western Libya. But he was kidnapped again and jailed for four months. “I refused to give them the phone number of my family, so they beat me on my head till I bled. I just couldn’t ask my family again for money.” He said he then managed, along with other enslaved Sudanese men, to hold down the Ethiopian guard at the jail and flee towards Tripoli, where he worked in a Turkish restaurant to earn some money and paid the smugglers 1200 Libyan Dinars to travel by boat towards Italy, spending five days at sea. In Italy, he was jailed twice before fleeing, because he didn’t want to stay there; he said he slept rough for two weeks in Rome, where NGOs fed him, then took a train to Ventimiglia where he walked the length of a train tunnel to Nice. “In France and Italy, I met so many generous Arabs and Sudanese people who gave me food for free; I didn’t have money at all throughout this journey.” Sitting in a pub in central London, waiting for the Home Office to decide on his case, he says: “I would love to study music and drama because I want to tell my story and my ordeal through acting.” The Home Office was contacted for comment.