Calais riot police tear gas hundreds of migrants trying to escape the 'Jungle'

Riot in the Jungle: Police fire tear gas at hundreds of migrants trying to escape camp so they can board lorries heading to Britain

Gangs of young men attempted to access the motorway on Thursday

There has been an escalation in the disorder in Calais in recent weeks

The population of the Jungle camp has swelled to more than 7,000

On Monday protesters will create a blockade of the northern French port

By SARAH DEAN and PRESS ASSOCIATION
PUBLISHED: 10:29 GMT, 2 September 2016 | UPDATED: 11:22 GMT, 2 September 2016

Riot police have once again been forced to fire tear gas at migrants attempting to ambush UK-bound traffic in Calais.

Hundreds of refugees living in the sprawling Calais Jungle camp were pushed back on Thursday after they reportedly tried to access the motorway that leads to the port.

The lengths migrants are going to in their desperate bid to get to Britain have reportedly escalated in recent weeks as The Jungle population continues to swell.

There has been an escalation in the disorder with reports of gangs using trees to block roads before masked men wielding sticks threaten motorists that stop.

The gangmasters then direct migrants to lorries queuing in the ensuing traffic jams in an attempt to stow away aboard vehicles destined for Britain.

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Tensions in the Calais Jungle continue to rise as young men attempt to storm the motorway nearby
and smuggle on to cars and lorries heading for Britain

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Riot police were forced to fire tear gas on Thursday as migrants attempted to access the motorway
in Calais

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Hundreds of men were reportedly trying to make their way onto the road that heads to the port

The altercation comes as the mayor of Calais pledged to turn out in support of 'Operation Snail' which will see protesters cause chaos for British travellers during a blockade of the northern French port on Monday.

Natacha Bouchart admitted the move would cause 'chaos' but that she wanted to 'show our solidarity' with hauliers and locals living and working amid fears of violence from organised gangs and migrants.

On a visit to Ashford, Kent, Ms Bouchart insisted the action would be for a 'good cause' by sending a signal to the French government that the migrant crisis in Calais needs tackling.

Despite efforts to reduce numbers, more than 7,000 migrants from countries including Sudan, Syria and Eritrea are living in the slum known as The Jungle on the outskirts of the port town.

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Police carried batons and shields as they were forced to confront migrants attempting to access the
motorway

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A migrant rides a bicycle at the Jungle camp as plumes of tear gas are seen behind him

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Many have hopes of crossing to Britain to forge new lives but some have taken their lives into their own hands, leading to reinforced security measures around the ports.

Speaking following a meeting with Kent business leaders, Ms Bouchart said the situation in Calais was 'unbearable'.

Asked whether she will be taking part in Monday's blockade, she said: 'The answer is yes. We will be on the field, we will go and greet and say hello to law and order forces.

'We will also say hello to the hauliers and the haulage companies to show our solidarity with their movement and also show to the French government that this is enough.

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Calais mayor Natacha Bouchart will take part in a blockade on Monday and has admitted the move
would cause 'chaos'

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The vast ‘Jungle’ camp full of UK-bound migrants in Calais is set to be torn down, French Interior
Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced (stock image)


'This is becoming unbearable and something needs to be done. It is part of our responsibility to do something. We are also asking for a total evacuation of the northern area of the camp.

'We will be there on the field as part of our duty.'

She added: 'There is chaos every day and every night. We want the French government to take its responsibilities and put an end to this particularly difficult time we are facing.'

'There might be chaos and disorder on Monday. This is for a good cause. We want things to change.

'We want to go back to business as usual and renew the serenity that we want to have with you to develop our businesses together.'

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Migrants in Calais are seen here forcing there way on to lorries headed to the Eurotunnel (file photo)

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Britain's Interior Minister Amber Rudd (centre) and her French counterpart Bernard Cazeneuve (left)
pose with French riot police officer Patrice Martin on Tuesday

Despite the violence, Ms Bouchart insisted Calais was safe. She said: 'If you are asking me about security in Calais, we have a lot of CCTV equipment.

'I think and I say today that my city is safe. I walk around myself day and night without bodyguards, so I can guarantee that Calais is a safe town.

'But of course the situation has to be improved and the state has to take its responsibility to put an end to this crisis.'

Controversy broke out last month at a proposal to allow migrants to lodge UK asylum claims on French soil - a plan dismissed by a Home Office source as a 'complete non-starter'.

And there have also been suggestions from France for the border to be moved back to Dover. Ms Bouchart declined to be drawn on the issue, saying it was a matter for member states.

She said: 'I cannot judge and I cannot answer this on behalf of the British government. I don't know how many migrants you are prepared to welcome into your country.'

This week Britain and France pledged to work together to address the crisis in the wake of questions about the future of co-operation on border controls.

The governments of the two countries presented a united front after a meeting between Home Secretary Amber Rudd and her counterpart, French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve.

Calais riot police tear gas hundreds of migrants trying to escape the 'Jungle' | Daily Mail Online

Let the French & Brits barge into africa, they will make it a livable country and they could use the sun.

Carnage in Calais: Horrific crash as jungle migrant gangs target tourists in cars in terrifying new AMBUSH technique that left our journalists covered in blood after narrowly escaping death

Ruthless gangs deliberately causing crashes on the roads to the French port by hurling large objects at cars

Home Secretary Amber Rudd has spoken out after a team of journalists narrowly escaped death last week

Reporter Ben Ellery and photographers Steve Burton and John McLellan were all injured

They had been investigating a shocking explosion of violence at the squalid migrant camp

By MICHAEL POWELL, ABUL TAHER AND NICK CRAVEN FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
PUBLISHED: 21:21 GMT, 3 September 2016 | UPDATED: 02:46 GMT, 4 September 2016

Migrants from the Calais Jungle camp are using a deadly new tactic in their attempts to get to Britain.

Ruthless gangs are deliberately causing crashes on the roads to the French port by hurling large objects at cars – then sneaking on to lorries caught up in the resulting tailbacks.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd has spoken out after a team of Mail on Sunday journalists narrowly escaped death last week when three migrants threw a log at their car, forcing it into the path of a 38-ton juggernaut.

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Migrants from the Calais Jungle camp are using a deadly new tactic in their attempts to get to Britain. Pictured, the MoS team's car crushed by a juggernaut

http://youtu.be/I_K2TQEVGgI

After being briefed about the incident, Ms Rudd issued a statement describing the development as 'extremely concerning'.

She added: 'It's vital that people feel safe when using the Channel ports. This shows just how it is in all our interests to combat attempts to enter the UK illegally.'

Reporter Ben Ellery, 32, and photographers Steve Burton and John McLellan were all injured when their British-registered Audi swerved to avoid the missile.

They then hit the lorry, sending their vehicle spinning out of control. The juggernaut dragged the car sideways for about 50 yards.

The three men were later rushed to hospital for treatment. Ellery's head was gashed to the bone after it struck the steering wheel, and he required eight stitches.

McLellan, 60, was left with deep cuts to his face, and Burton, 57, suffered a gash on his head and severe bruising to his back.

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Home Secretary Amber Rudd has spoken out after a team of Mail on Sunday journalists narrowly escaped death last week. Pictured, a map of the incident

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Desperate: We filmed migrants who had placed a branch on to the carriageway to force UK-bound traffic to stop. A third member of the gang is out of shot

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Brazen: One man tried to climb into the gap between the cab and the trailer of the stopped lorry in Calais

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French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve has pledged to close jungle camp – where numbers have swelled by 3,000 to more than 9,000

They had been investigating a shocking explosion of violence at the squalid migrant camp and the growing number of attacks on trucks heading for Britain.

This sinister escalation risks the lives of thousands of British families using ferries and the Channel Tunnel as they return from their summer holidays. And it comes ahead of planned 'go slow' protest by French truckers tomorrow that is likely to cause chaos for returning tourists.

French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve has pledged to close the camp – where numbers have swelled by 3,000 to more than 9,000 – by the end of the year, but local residents want him to speed up the process. An extra 200 police officers have been dispatched to the area and uniformed French troops have also started patrolling.

A Calais police source told The Mail on Sunday there had been a number of reported incidents 'of projectiles being thrown directly at cars, so as to force them to stop'.

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Dazed and bloodied: Ben Ellery staggers to the side of the road after the crash

He said the menacing new tactic – along with blockades on the road –'was of huge concern, and was likely to result in very serious accidents'.

French officials and hospital staff confirmed that migrants are deliberately causing accidents to create traffic tailbacks on the N216 motorway into the ferry port, and the A16 to the Channel Tunnel. They are also putting up barricades.

Quentin Patte, an emergency doctor at Calais Hospital, told The Mail on Sunday: 'Targeting motorists in order to cause accidents is a new tactic. A colleague treated someone recently who was injured when a migrant threw something at their vehicle near the port.'

Another doctor at the hospital revealed asylum-seekers come into the hospital daily after being wounded in vicious knife fights in the camp.

He said: 'They come in every day with stab wounds. There is particularly a rivalry between the Afghans and the Sudanese. They are given priority because their wounds are so serious.'

A paramedic told our reporters: 'This is happening all the time now. It's a war out there.'

Lorry drivers are experiencing soaring violence, threats and intimidation as they pass through the French port, according to locals.

Every night, squads of French riot police are involved in running battles with gangs. The police fire tear gas as they chase them from the edge of the main roads.

Police say they are dealing with around 30 blockades each night.

A team of highway workers toils through the night constantly clearing debris from the motorways around the port and tunnel.

Jean-Marc Puissesseau, president of the port of Calais, said: 'Migrants are throwing tree trunks, branches and shopping carts at cars on the motorway. It is very dangerous.'

David Sagnard, president of the local branch of France's national federation of lorry drivers, said: 'The violence of the migrants has not gone up by a notch, but by ten.

'Why do we have to risk our lives on the motorway just doing our job, or simply because we're tourists? It is not acceptable.'

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The Audi belonging to Mail on Sunday Reporter Ben Ellery was written off in the collision with a lorry in Calais

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Frederic Houtecoeur, a lorry driver from Belgium, said: 'Every night we are coming up against migrants and our lives are put at risk. It is extremely dangerous'

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Jean-Marc Puissesseau, president of the port of Calais, said: 'Migrants are throwing tree trunks, branches and shopping carts at cars on the motorway.
It is very dangerous'

A two-mile-long, £2.5 million fence – paid for by British taxpayers – was erected in Calais last year to stop migrants jumping into the back of lorries while they were queuing to cross the Channel. Now the migrants, mainly young men from Sudan, Ethiopia and Afghanistan, are targeting vehicles on the motorway two miles away, at the point where the fence ends.

Our reporting team was investigating the worrying phenomenon when they came under attack in the early hours of Friday on the N216.

Half an hour earlier they saw police clearing metal crowd-control barriers which had been strewn across the A16.

The night before, the team filmed three migrants as they brazenly tried to board a lorry that had stopped on the motorway because tree branches had been dragged across the carriageway.

One migrant attempted to climb into the gap between the cab and the trailer of the lorry as two of his friends looked on, hoping he could smuggle himself into the UK.

The shocked driver sounded his horn before deciding to drive over the branches to get away from the men, who fled into the woods when police arrived.

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Our reporting team was investigating the worrying phenomenon when they came under attack in the early hours of Friday on the N216. Pictured,
Ben Ellery (left) and photographer John McLellan

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David Sagnard, president of the local branch of France's national federation of lorry drivers, said: 'The violence of the migrants has not gone up by a notch,
but by ten'

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Barrier: Two migrants at the two-mile long fence that guards the port of Calais in the north of France

Regional highways boss Xavier Delebarre said: 'The gangs have tools including chainsaws. There is a strategy to their concerted, simultaneous assaults.'

He said it amounted to a sinister 'game' and described how workers have come across a number of dead bodies of migrants who had been hit by lorries after they had run into the road.

Frederic Houtecoeur, a lorry driver from Belgium, said: 'Every night we are coming up against migrants and our lives are put at risk. It is extremely dangerous.'

Currently a record 1,900 French police are deployed in Calais. But Keith Vaz, chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, last night called for British police to be sent to France to help deal with the violence.

He said: 'This is becoming a war zone with wanton violence being perpetrated against drivers. It is totally unacceptable that the situation has reached crisis point.'
Pictures by Steve Burton and John McLellan

'IT'S CHAOS OUT THERE' SAY BRITS CAUGHT UP THE CALAIS JUNGLE MAYHEM

Many other Britons have been terrorised by migrant gangs, including top equestrian Lucy Phillips, whose horsebox was attacked last month.

Migrants built a 3ft barrier with felled trees to block Lucy’s route to the Calais ferry terminal then smashed a window of the horsebox, showering her mother Liz, 63, with broken glass and scaring her gelding Pitucelli.

Lucy, 26, from Solihull, West Midlands, said: ‘The attack seemed to go on for a lifetime before police arrived.’

Delivery driver Glen Shadbolt, 39, from Knebworth, Hertfordshire, charged his 3.5-ton minivan through a similar barrier. He said: ‘It’s absolute chaos out there.’

And last month, 40 migrants surrounded Londoner Irshaad Dar’s car and smashed the windows with metal bars. He added: ‘I was shaking with fear.’

MoS man chillingly tells how he narrowly avoided death when a tree trunk was hurled at his car by migrant gangs in Calais
By Ben Ellery in Calais for the Mail on Sunday

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Injured: Photographer Steve, on a stretcher, and colleague John in the
ambulance last week

Like millions of Britons, I have driven along the featureless road leading to the Calais ferry port so many times over the years it has become a familiar final glimpse of France before heading home.

For a few sickening moments early on Friday, I feared it might be the last thing I ever saw.

But the most chilling aspect of the crash in which my car was written off and my two passengers and I narrowly escaped death, was that it was not an accident at all – but the result of a deliberate, cold-blooded act.

The tree trunk hurled at our car which caused the near-fatal swerve could have been thrown at any family travelling back to the UK. And the next victims may not be so lucky.

I was with photographers John McLellan and Steve Burton after investigating the increasing menace that migrant gangs pose for motorists around Calais. We were about to find out only too clearly.

We were on the autoroute to the ferry port, travelling at about 50mph, when three migrants suddenly appeared on the right side of the road. I saw one of them was carrying a thick log. With both hands he hurled it at the windscreen and I instinctively jerked the steering wheel to the left. I felt a sickening jolt as the car was hit by an articulated lorry and we spun out of control. Then we were pushed sideways at speed along the road by the 38-ton truck.

I expected to hit another vehicle at any moment. I stabbed at the brake pedal furiously but we were at the mercy of the larger vehicle.

My face cracked against the steering wheel and John let out a moan as his face smashed into his camera. After about 50 yards, we came to a halt.

I asked Steve and John if they were OK, but neither could speak. One let out a groan. I could feel blood gushing out of my own face.

I was not sure whether it was safer to stay in the car and risk getting hit by an oncoming vehicle, or to walk on to the carriageway.

I also didn’t know whether the migrants might want to attack us again.

I stumbled from the car on to a carpet of smashed glass. The lorry was blocking John’s door and he scrambled out of mine.

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Paramedics turned up within minutes and I saw Steve (pictured) being loaded on to a stretcher in a neck brace, writes Ben Ellery

My adrenaline was surging and I staggered to the side of the road. After about 30 seconds the police arrived. I motioned for them to get Steve out of the car.

Paramedics turned up within minutes and I saw Steve being loaded on to a stretcher in a neck brace. The lorry driver, a Hungarian called Ferenc, ran up to John and gave him a hug.

He started apologising but John told him it wasn’t his fault. Ferenc had seen the migrants too and there was nothing he could do.

I got into the ambulance and a paramedic told me I would have to have stitches as bone was visible under a deep gash.

One medic said he thought British volunteers were helping the migrants with equipment such as chainsaws to create blockades. At the hospital I was told of a tourist treated for injuries after a migrant threw something at their car.

As one doctor put eight stitches in my face, another came in and said two migrants had just been admitted with knife wounds inflicted during a fight. One was critical having been stabbed in the neck, and the other’s lungs had been punctured. My CT scan was delayed as they were given priority. The doctor said: ‘This happens every day.’

The next day I went to the Commissariat de Police in Calais to find out what happened to my car and was told by an officer that these sort of attacks were happening ‘tous les jours.’

At the recovery compound I shuddered at the sight of my caved-in car and the thought of how lucky we were to survive.

Would a young family have come out alive from the same attack? I don’t think they would.

FRANCE MUST TACKLE THIS ANARCHY BEFORE THE SITUATION BECOMES FATAL

Comment by Charlie Elphicke, Conservative MP for Dover

Hurling logs at cars to deliberately cause a crash marks a horrific escalation of the danger facing drivers in Calais.

The evidence obtained by The Mail on Sunday makes me fear that unless action is taken – and now – by the French authorities, then it is only a matter of time before someone is killed.

This is why I will be going into the Home Office this week to urge the Government to put more pressure on the French to tackle the anarchy.

Drivers already have to face masked men lurking by the roadside, their faces lit by flames as they grip revving chainsaws and hurl burning trees across the carriageway. As lorries are stopped in their tracks by the flames, men emerge from the bushes to clamber on to the backs of the vehicles.

Drivers are nightly running the gauntlet of ruthless people-traffickers armed with anything from machetes to petrol bombs.

The situation is so bad that the Road Haulage Association now advises its drivers not to stop their vehicles if they are within 125 miles of the port. Many companies draw the exclusion zone even wider, to 150 miles – up to the outskirts of Paris, and beyond Brussels. It is just too dangerous for drivers to stop within this zone.


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Hurling logs at cars to deliberately cause a crash marks a horrific escalation of the danger facing drivers in Calais, writes MP Charlie Elphicke

Take the case of one driver who has contacted me in recent days. When Steve Valentine pulled up at a petrol station on the road to Calais he discovered two African migrants trying to break into his lorry.

When he confronted them a fight broke out, during which his front teeth were knocked out.

After a prolonged tussle, he managed to pin them both up to the back of the vehicle and called over to the French police who were standing just 80 yards away. They ignored him, and he was forced to let the migrants go.

For years the French and British governments have targeted only the symptoms of this Calais crisis. They have built fences to keep migrants away from the docks – but the attacks on trucks now just occur further down the road. They have built containers for migrants to stay in – yet thousands more have arrived.

The Jungle camp, now home to 9,000 desperate people, is at bursting point.

During my meeting at the Home Office I will argue that the first step must be to dismantle The Jungle and build a new repatriation centre far from the port. All migrants would be immediately registered, and those with genuine asylum cases need to be processed.

The rest must be sent home – and swiftly.

We must also do more to secure the Channel with a new Dover Patrol to catch the people-traffickers as they attempt to make the crossing.

The Government should recall those Royal Navy units which are currently patrolling the Mediterranean: nations in that region already have more border control vessels than we do.

Some French politicians have talked about tearing up the Le Touquet treaty, which establishes British customs checks at Calais. But the French know just as well as we do that this would be a disaster for both nations. It would simply force the ferries and Tunnel to become border guards – at the price of higher ticket prices and longer queues.

It is critical to smash the people-traffickers. These modern-day slavers must be caught and jailed – put behind bars for at least 20 years and have all of their assets seized.

If the situation deteriorates any further, I believe the French army will have to be called in.

The Mail on Sunday team thankfully escaped with their lives. The next drivers to be targeted might not be so lucky.

Horrific crash as jungle migrant gangs target tourists in cars | Daily Mail Online