Confrontation between migrants and gendarmes on a beach in Pas-de-Calais

2023-04-29 13:46:36

A tense operation against illegal immigration pitted around sixty migrants against the police on Saturday morning April 29 on a beach in Pas-de-Calais, Agence France-Presse (AFP) learned from the police station. Shortly after 7 a.m., in Oye-Plage, a gendarme was stabbed in the hand as he “tried to burst the boat” in which a group of around sixty migrants wanted to attempt the crossing of the English Channel, the commander of the Pas-de-Calais gendarmerie group, General Frantz Tavart, told AFP, specifying that this agent, including an artery was hit, had to be operated on.

The gendarmerie tries to identify the author of the blow among the sixty migrants, mostly men, but also women and children. The facts happened, according to Frantz Tavart, “in a certain crowd, in the middle of tear gas” used by the gendarmes in the face of an immediately very tense context. The gendarmerie destroyed, according to him, three boats in this same sector during the night from Friday to Saturday.

The general pointed “the increase in violence against the police” during these interventions against clandestine crossings, reporting that a gendarme had received “strikes” under similar circumstances two days earlier.

Hypothermia

Amélie Moyart, coordinator of Utopia 56 for the Grande-Synthe area, where several hundred migrants live waiting to cross to Great Britain, for her part, told AFP that a group of 50 migrants had called the association on Saturday morning. Drenched, they said their boat had been slashed when they were already in the water, she said.

The firefighters then asked the association to provide dry clothes to a couple with a 20-month-old baby, who remained behind the group. In a state of hypothermia, this family was taken by firefighters to Calais hospital.

Insisting on size “humanitarian” of the work of the gendarmes, General Tavart denounces the “complicity” of Utopia 56, believing that it brings a “logistical support, not just moral” migrants, putting them at risk of drowning.

In 2022, around 46,000 people crossed the English Channel in 2022 in small craft. Five died and four disappeared in these dangerous crossings, according to the count of the maritime prefecture. In November 2021, 27 people died in the sinking of their boat.

The World with AFP