Lille, France - A fire razed most of the
Grande-Synthe migrant camp near Dunkirk in northern France
overnight after fighting among its inhabitants left several
people injured, the region's top government official said early
on Tuesday.
The camp, set up just over a year ago and equipped with
tightly-packed wooden cabins and sanitation, had housed around
1 500 people, many of them Kurds.
Its population has grown recently with a surge of arrivals
from Afghanistan.
"The camp has largely been destroyed," Michel Lalande,
prefect for France's Nord region, said by telephone, adding that
the fire followed a fight between the Afghans and Kurds there.
Grande-Synthe has been home to one of the largest groups of
Britain-bound migrants on the French coast since the closure
last October of a sprawling shanty town outside the nearby port
of Calais.
Last week, some of its inhabitants tried to block the nearby
highway with tree trunks and branches in an attempt to stop the
traffic and clamber onto the trucks and cars in the hope of
reaching Britain.
Sights like these in recent years to some extent drove
Britons to vote for a divorce from Europe last summer.
A huge fire tears through the Grande-Synthe migrant camp outside the northern French city of Dunkirk https://t.co/9298zhzDzj pic.twitter.com/tEy6lJyqeB
— AFP news agency (@AFP) April 11, 2017
The large influx into Europe of migrants fleeing poverty and
war elsewhere is also a hot button issue in France, where the
far-right, anti-immigration leader Marine Le Pen is one of the
frontrunners in a presidential election now less than two weeks
away.
Le Pen on Tuesday repeated that she would close migrant
camps and France's borders, also drastically cutting migration
should she be elected.
"This chaos has to end," she said in a statement. Opinion
polls show Le Pen tied with centrist Emmanuel Macron in the
first round on April 23 then losing to him in a run-off of the
two top scoring candidates on May 7.
Lalande said five people had been hurt as a result of the
blaze.
At least another five were injured after scuffles and a
knife fight broke out in the camp earlier in the evening,
regional authorities said. Riot police intervened.
One migrant was knocked over by a car on a highway outside
the camp and was in a critical condition.
Lalande earlier told journalists that it was unlikely that
the camp, set up by medical aid charity Medecins Sans
Frontieres, could be rebuilt.
Much of the camp was reduced to rubble. Migrants were taken
to makeshift shelters nearby.