Blazing barricades return to Calais
MIGRANTS trying to get from France to Britain set up a burning roadblock on a motorway yesterday for the first time since the Jungle camp in Calais was razed last year.
They had hoped to use the improvised barricade on the A16 at Marck to get lorries heading to England to stop so they could climb aboard.
Would-be stowaways regularly used the burning blockades before the Jungle was razed last October and up to 8,000 inhabitants were relocated across France.
A spokesman for the local authority that covers Calais said: ‘The latest barricade went up at around 3.30am on Thursday.
‘Piles of wood, including tree branches, were placed on the road, and then attempts were made to light them all. There was no
‘The situation is worrying again’
disruption to traffic on this occasion, and the police managed to clear the obstruction quickly, but the return of these methods is certainly worrying.’
HGV drivers, many of them British, have reported attacks on their vehicles, including having bricks and branches thrown at their windscreens and their tyres slashed.
French police say they have seen groups of Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants fighting each other, almost certainly over people smuggling routes.
Xavier Bertrand, the most senior politician in the Calais area, has warned of a summer of chaos as thousands of migrants return to the port as the weather improves.
Mr Bertrand, head of the Hauts-de-France regional council, wrote a letter to prime minister Edouard Philippe this week, saying: ‘The situation has become worrying again.
‘I’m regularly alerted by road hauliers who are seeing an upsurge in damage caused to their trucks.
‘Every day residents, elected and business leaders express their concerns about the return of the migrants to Calais.’
Migrants are not officially banned from Calais, and there are thought to be up to 600 of them living in squats within 30 miles of the town.
The crisis worsened in April when an official camp set up by the local council in Grande-Synthe, near Dunkirk, burnt down following a fight between Afghan and Sudanese men.
Some of the residents moved to Calais and are still sleeping rough in the town.