Exiled leader to run for office again
POLICE REINFORCEMENTS arrived in the French port city of Calais yesterday after clashes among migrants left 22 people injured, with the government warning of more potential violence among those seeking to cross into the UK.
Interior minister Gerard Collomb said five of the victims were injured by gunfire in Thursday’s fighting. A 16-year-old Eritrean boy said to be among the victims.
Speaking in Calais, he blamed migrant traffickers and “totally organised” gangs for the violence.
Police are seeking a shooting suspect but have made no arrests, he said.
Firearms are rare among migrants, and the shootings represent the most serious clash in recent times among migrants around Calais.
Two extra police units arrived yesterday, Mr Collomb said.
He added that while in the past such violence was spontaneous, it appears to be growing more organised.
He said local authorities have dismantled six migrant trafficking networks already this year, compared to 20 in all of 2017.
The prefecture of the Pas-deCalais region said the gunfire was the culmination of a showdown between Afghan and Eritrean migrants, fighting each other with sticks and stones, after a meal distribution near the Calais hospital.
In a second confrontation, up to 200 Eritrean migrants cornered 30 Afghans near the former site of a makeshift migrant camp that housed thousands of people before it was evacuated and destroyed in 2016.
Mr Collomb said the government will start meal distribution to migrants outside Calais in the coming two weeks, instead of leaving it to aid groups, in an effort to stop feeding spots from becoming fixed nodes of tension.
Insisting that “very few” people successfully sneak across to Britain, Mr Collomb said: “If you want to go to Britain, you shouldn’t go to Calais.”
Mr Collomb also called for long-term solutions to speed up asylum decisions and deport economic migrants with no right to refugee status.
Tensions have been high in Calais since the camp was destroyed. More than 1,130 French security forces have been posted in Calais to keep migrants out of the port and Eurotunnel and to stop them from setting up camps.
Charities on the ground have said the violence left children as young as 13 with “nowhere to go” because the scrubland they had been sleeping on became too dangerous.
Margot Bernard, of charity Safe Passage, said around 200 more refugees had arrived in the last two weeks, with tensions being exacerbated by a dearth of information and a “lack of action” by the French and UK governments.
The news comes after a man was charged with people smuggling after nine migrants were rescued from a boat crossing the English Channel.
Afrim Xhekaliu has been charged with assisting illegal entry after he and eight others were rescued by lifeboat crews.
The exiled former president of the Maldives has said he will run again for office, hours after a supreme court decision to free a group of political prisoners led to unrest in the capital.
Police arrested two opposition supporters as protesters clashed with police for a second night in the Indian Ocean archipelago. Demonstrators called for the release of nine prisoners.