A Sudanese migrant has been crushed to death by a truck in a second night of chaos at the French end of the Channel Tunnel as 2,000 migrants attempted to stowaway on vehicles travelling to Britain.
Local police and tunnel security said hundreds of migrants had scaled fences around the Coquelles terminal in northern France and attempted to smuggle themselves on board vehicles.
The Times reports that the migrant who died was crushed by a truck as he tried to climb underneath it, becoming the eighth to die at the terminal this month.
The migrants, who are desperately trying to enter Britain, changed tactics on Monday to using force of numbers to storm the terminal and attempt to break through all at once. They repeated this last night.
Police said they were unable to give an exact figure of how many managed to penetrate the 13 miles of fencing around the terminal, but various estimates put the number somewhere between 750 and 1,200.
Police rounded up all those they caught before placing them on buses and sending them back to the large migrant camp on the outskirts of the town of Calais.
Eurotunnel said that “using its own resources” it had stopped 37,000 attempts to reach the UK so far this year. However, it also called for assistance from the French and British governments, saying: “The nightly pressure is more than what a concession-holder can reasonably handle.”
Spokesman John Keefe said that none of the migrants succeeded in reaching Britain last night, although the process of rounding them all up again and placing them on buses back to the camp took all night.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said he was sending 120 extra police officers to the site today to prevent a repeat of the scenes tonight. His British counterpart Theresa May is chairing an emergency committee meeting to deal with the crisis after promising to contribute £7 million to build stronger fencing at the terminal.
UKIP leader Nigel Farage called for the French army to be deployed at Calais.
“The intensity and the desperate efforts of those who want to get to Britain, and we understand why they do, is becoming more and more severe,” he said.
“Just talk to the lorry drivers who are having bricks thrown in front of their tyres, every attempt being made to actually stop the lorries so people can try and get on.”
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.