Migrants Evade Security to Enter Tunnel in France
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Version 0 of 1. LONDON — Despite the expenditure of millions of dollars to reinforce fencing around the opening of the Channel Tunnel in France, about 200 migrants broke through security just after midnight on Friday, clashing with police officers and forcing a temporary suspension of both passenger and freight rail services. Rail services resumed on Saturday morning, but there were significant delays caused by continuing safety checks; about 120 migrants had managed to enter the tunnel before being intercepted by the French police more than 9 miles inside, according to Eurotunnel and the police. The tunnel is over 31 miles long. “Such a large group had no chance of reaching the U.K., so this was clearly an organized attack aimed at drawing media attention to the desperate situation of the migrants who are stuck in Calais,” Eurotunnel said in a statement. If so, the migrants succeeded. The larger migrant crisis in Europe, with many thousands traveling through Greece and Italy to try to reach Germany, has overshadowed the situation of migrants in the makeshift camps outside Calais known as the “jungle.” But they continue to try to reach Britain by hiding in trucks and trains. Two police officers and four migrants suffered minor injuries, said the local authorities in the Pas-de-Calais region. Unions for train drivers have threatened to strike because of the stress on drivers who fear accidentally killing migrants who might be hiding in the tunnel. On Wednesday, an Eritrean migrant was found dead in the tunnel, apparently hit by a freight train, the police said, the latest of 13 migrants killed this year in the area, most of them at the Eurotunnel site. Three were killed in September. Train drivers of the C.G.T. union wrote an open letter last week saying, “Today, we are afraid. Afraid to start, afraid to finish, afraid to drive,” as well as “afraid to hit, smash, electrocute,” according to The Associated Press. The letter, addressed to the French government, asked for a solution that does not involve the use of force. “Hitting a refugee with your train, seeing people die on the rails, is really something traumatizing,” a C.G.T. spokesman, Hervé Gomet, said Friday on France Info radio. He said the problem would not be solved by putting up barbed wire fences. The British government has given more money and security fencing to go around the French side of the complex, which has a perimeter of 17 miles. There are more security and police officers at the site to prevent break-ins and illegal entries. In a statement, Eurotunnel said that “we understand the emotion described in this letter.” Eurotunnel set up a support group of psychologists for the drivers and staff members at the end of July, when more than 2,000 attempts to penetrate the tunnel were registered, a spokesman, Romain Dufour, said on Friday. The issue of immigration is politically sensitive in Britain, with Prime Minister David Cameron demanding changes to Britain’s relationship to the European Union and restrictions on benefits for legal migrants before an in-or-out referendum on membership in the bloc due by the end of 2017. Britain will vote to leave the European Union if it does not secure “robust, substantial and irreversible” reforms, Philip Hammond, the British foreign secretary, warned on Saturday, on the eve of the annual Conservative Party conference. “If we can’t get the commitments we need from our European partners on things like Britain being outside the commitment to ever-closer union,” he said, “we rule nothing out.” The Conservatives have a small majority in Parliament, but almost a third of their 330 legislators are thought to want to leave the union. Most polls show a majority of Britons want to stay in the bloc, but those in favor of leaving are gaining ground, in part because of Europe’s chaotic handling of the migrant crisis. |