LOON-PLAGE, France — Police dismantled a camp housing hundreds of migrants near Dunkirk in
northern
France on Wednesday after one person was killed and three wounded in
suspected score-settling between smugglers, authorities said.
اضافة اعلان
Around 500 people,
mainly
Iraqi Kurds, had been living at the wooded site in Loon-Plage, near a
canal that often serves as a key launching point for boats hoping to cross the
English Channel for Britain. Buses stood by to bring the migrants to shelters,
but most left instead on foot, carrying what belongings they could.
On Monday night, one
migrant was shot and killed and another wounded by what volunteer aid workers
described as machinegun fire, the day after two others were also shot and
wounded, one seriously. Ammunition from “weapons of war” were found, Dunkirk’s
state prosecutor Sebastian Pieve had told AFP on Tuesday, and a clash between
rival smuggling groups was “a theory, but it’s not easy to establish”. “But it’s certain that human trafficking is
the backdrop to this,” he said.
Dawan, a 32-year-old
Kurd, would say only “mafia, mafia” when asked by AFP about the shootings. He
said he had recently paid $1,700 (1,600 euros) to a smuggler who said he would
get him to
England after spending five months in France, but the man
disappeared the next day.
Claire Millot of the
Salam migrant aid group said most volunteer associations had quit operating at
Loon-Plage out of security fears, adding that Africans and other nationalities
had recently been seen in an area usually occupied mainly by
Kurds. More than
7,000 migrants have managed to cross the busy shipping lane and reach the
British coast since January, after the number of arrivals tripled to over
28,000 last year — which saw at least 30 migrants die while trying.
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