Latest news with #gendarmes
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
On the beaches of northern France, exhausted police admit they've lost control
Karwan and Sara watch as smugglers hoist Mohammed, their six-year-old son, and Alina, their four-year-old daughter, onto their shoulders, wade out to sea, and bundle them onto an overloaded dinghy. Behind them, a crowd of 200 or so migrants are herded like cattle, waist-deep in the water, waiting their turn. The people-smugglers shout and shove them into position. More than 70 passengers are eventually squeezed on board the barely seaworthy vessel, their feet dangling over the side, ready to motor towards Dover. A French police patrol boat lazily circles the inflatable dinghy, watching the chaos unfold. It is 6am on Gravelines beach, and all in a day's work for the smugglers that increasingly control this sweeping stretch of coastline. All they have to do now is wade through the surf and head back unhindered towards the dunes 300 metres away to regroup and plan tomorrow's crossings. The scenes are painfully familiar to any of the 1,200 gendarmes deployed along France's northern beaches. Some told The Telegraph they are outmanoeuvred and outnumbered by the smugglers, who who adapt their tactics at pace. 'We are helpless... there is a French expression 'donner de la tête', we are overwhelmed and don't know where to start, we don't know where to go, there are so many boats leaving,' says Marc Musiol, a French border police officer in Pas-de-Calais. One well-placed international policing source labelled the situation a 'failure'. Since the beginning of this year, there have been 22,360 arrivals via small boats into the UK – an almost 60 per cent increase on last year. The numbers are rising as Sir Keir Starmer promised to 'smash the gangs' and hailed a new deal with Emmanuel Macron to stem the tide. But authorities here suggest the 'one-in, one-out' pledge is not worth the paper it is written on. Some also pour scorn on Mr Macron for talking tough without following through with 'concrete' changes. The scene on the beaches of Gravelines on Thursday morning is one replicated along the coast of northern France day in, day out, when the weather permits. In the early hours, police patrol cars scour the 200km of coastline between the border of Belgium and the Bay de Somme estuary. Police use drones fitted with night vision technology to scan the dunes where the migrants, mostly young adult men, will camp for the night before they attempt to cross the Channel. But the distances make it easy for smugglers and migrants to hide from stretched authorities. Gendarmes drive beige 4x4s in teams of three, drive down the shoreline, and survey the waters for inflatable dinghies. 'We are here every night, it is always the same, it never changes,' one officer said as he patrolled a beach car park. 'The migrants are everywhere.' The Telegraph encountered six patrols in the space of two hours during a 3am drive from Calais towards Wimereux, a seaside commune south of Boulogne and another known hotspot for Channel crossings. Interceptions remain scarce. Smugglers launch simultaneous crossings from up to 10 different beaches at a time to divide police attention and resources. Pre-inflated dinghies are launched from waterways and canals dozens of kilometres from the pickup point and sail down the coast. The smugglers use weather apps, such as Windy, on their phones to help them plan their crossings. The apps provide up-to-the-second information on wind speed, direction, and the swell. Sentries linked to the smuggling gangs are posted in the dunes and near the camps to watch for the boats. They alert over the phone that the dinghy is arriving and that it is time for its passengers to get on board. Mr Musiol said: 'There are always small groups of smugglers who know our beaches very, very well.' Often carrying nothing other than orange life jackets bought from Decathlon around their necks, the migrants sprint across the beach, hoping to do so before the police have time to react. Sometimes officers do, and fire a salvo of tear gas from grenade launchers. But this is often not enough. 'You have smugglers and their friends who throw stones at the police officers to distract them and to get the migrants onto the boat as quickly as possible,' one officer said. He estimated that there are roughly only three to six police officers for every 50 migrants trying to enter the sea. 'We have a lack of officers and you have a huge, huge amount of the coast to monitor,' he said. 'It is not possible with the number of the personnel the border police have, the gendarmerie, to monitor this entire stretch of coastline and beach.' The camps where migrants live are even more lawless. Inside the main camp at Loon Plage, 12 kilometres south-west of Dunkirk, shootings and stabbings between warring gangs for control of the best beaches are commonplace. On July 8, a 44-year-old Kurd from Iraq was shot five times in the legs at the camp. Around two dozen armed police were deployed that day to quell the violence. The month before, two other migrants were shot dead and another five injured. Balkan crime groups have established themselves as the dominant players in orchestrating the operations, but police sources say East African gangs out of Eritrea, especially, are rivalling them. One police source with knowledge of the people-smuggling gangs said efforts to stop the migrants were futile without a strategy to break up the wider smuggling networks. 'If you are dealing with it in Calais, you have failed, you are never going to succeed,' they said. 'You have got to look at it earlier on and deal with the cause of all of these problems. 'They are going to keep trying, a week later, they are going to give it another go. What else are they going to do, camp in Calais for the rest of their life? It's just not realistic.' Locals along the coast here, meanwhile, are fed up with seeing their coastline dominated by years of crisis and inaction. Alain Boonefaes, the deputy mayor of Gravelines, whose remit includes the town's safety and security, admitted the problem is endemic and there is little to be done. The seaside resort town, 30km south-east of Dunkirk, relies on tourism for survival but can see up to 350 migrant departures in a single evening. The mayor and many others in the town are deeply sceptical about Mr Macron's one-in-one-out policy, agreed with Sir Keir during the French president's three-day visit to London last week. The trial would allow the UK to return selected numbers of small boat arrivals to France. In exchange, the UK will admit an equal number of asylum seekers with legitimate ties, such as family. Even the police are sceptical. 'Macron has made political announcements and not concrete ones,' said Mr Musiol. 'We have the impression that nothing will change in terms of the police officer's work itself. 'You can put a police officer on every beach on the Opal Coast. The migrants will continue to come. We must stop this problem at the source – that is, in the country of origin.' He said 'there is no lasting solution that could stop the problem' along the coast here and in Britain, where migrants arrive and are ushered into camps and hotels. On Thursday morning, The Telegraph saw first-hand the limits of the policing operation. Gendarmes fired a salvo of tear gas into the sand dunes 300 metres from the shore, where hundreds of migrants had camped overnight. Coughing and spluttering, they were led out onto the beach by the smugglers, away from the haze of white smoke and towards the shore. Here they sat and waited for around 10 minutes for the 'taxi boat', launched from the west on River Aa, which runs through the centre of Gravelines and leads out into the sea, to arrive. The majority of the migrants were young men from the Middle East or Vietnam. An Iranian family of four – mother and father Karwan and Sara, and son and daughter, Alina and Mohammed – were a rare sight. Sara, one of only three women in the crowd, spoke in broken English of how her family had travelled nearly 9,000 kilometres from Tehran and had journeyed through Turkey and Germany to reach Calais. She indicated that they had spent 10 days at one of the camps near Dunkirk. This was their first attempt at a crossing. Sara dabbed tears from her eyes with her headscarf, watching Alina, her pink trousers pulled up to her knees, splash and dance joyfully in the water, oblivious to the perils around her. Karwan, gave no answer when asked what had made the family leave Tehran. He waded through the water as a 'taxi boat', already filled with 50 or so passengers, drew near to the shore. Sara and Karwan walked through the surf holding each other's hands, also clutching life jackets. Around them, smugglers bullied their human cargo into place. Alina and Mohammad were carried on the shoulders of smugglers and handed over to migrants already on board the boats, who hauled them in. They were followed by their mother and father, who sat in the centre of the flimsy dinghy. The passengers cheered and waved to those left behind on the beach and sailed, under a police escort, towards the UK. One of those left on the shore was Leo, a 25-year-old aspiring engineering student from Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan, who had paid smugglers €1,500 (£1,296) to ferry him across the Channel. He had hoped to join his sister, who had made it to the UK last week via a small boat and is living in Manchester. He said: 'I left because of the Taliban. This was my first go, I will go again, I will go to London. My sister is married. The rest of my family, my papa, my mother, are still in Afghanistan.' Leo had fled his home country at the age of 13, making his way through Iran, Turkey, Germany, Sweden, and now Calais over the course of more than a decade. He followed the others up the hill towards the dune and back to the ramshackle, gang-ridden camp he calls home in Dunkirk. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more. Solve the daily Crossword
Arab News
4 days ago
- Politics
- Arab News
French court overturns town's burkini ban after woman threatened with fines
LONDON: The Marseilles administrative court has reversed a burkini ban on a French Riviera beach after police threatened fines against a teenager and her family for wearing the Muslim swimsuit, The Times reported on Thursday. The seaside town of Carry-le-Rouet had implemented the ban in June 2024, but it was found by the court to be a 'serious and illegal breach of fundamental freedoms' following the incident. The ban was largely irrelevant until July 2, when an 18-year-old Muslim woman from the city of Marseille went to the town's beach. Two municipal officers spotted her in the sea and ordered her out using whistles. Her family asked what she had done wrong, and the officers said the woman's garment was 'not acceptable,' according to her brother Islan. The police called for reinforcements. Five gendarmes who arrived later threatened the 18-year-old with fines unless she and her family left the beach. Islan said the family then left the area. 'My sister has taken it badly,' he added. 'She is afraid to go out now, does not communicate with other people and avoids talking about what happened.' The incident led to the Human Rights League seeking a court order overturning the town's burkini ban. Over the past decade, about 20 towns and cities on the French coast, including Cannes, have tried to ban the Muslim swimsuit on secular grounds, though almost all the bans were denied or later overturned. In 2004, France banned Muslim headscarves in schools after MPs decided that the garment violates the secular values of the state education system. Niqabs and burqas were outlawed in public in 2011 based on concerns that criminals could conceal their identities using the religious garbs.
BBC News
04-07-2025
- BBC News
French police slash inflatable migrant boat heading to UK
Amid chaotic scenes, French police waded into shallow waters off a beach south of Boulogne early on Friday morning and used knives to slash an inflatable small boat - packed with men, women and children - that was wallowing, dangerously, in the those onboard clambered to safety as the boat intervention was highly unusual. French police usually follow strict rules that bar them from going into the sea in case they put lives at risk."Let's go in," said one of the gendarmes, pulling off his body armour, and taking out a small knife. His colleagues took their heavy armour off, too, placing equipment in the back of a nearby police car before rushing into the is possible to see this rare incident as evidence that the French police - under growing pressure to stop a surge of small boat migrant crossings to the UK - are changing their tactics. But well-placed sources in France have told us that the procedural changes now being considered will almost certainly focus on the use of patrol boats at sea to intercept the "taxi-boats" before they're fully loaded, rather than on approving more aggressive interventions from police on the beaches. A few metres offshore, the boat itself was clearly in trouble. People were crowded around the outboard motor, which had briefly stalled but was being restarted. Waves were breaking underneath the boat, causing it to lurch wildly, and there were loud screams from several children who were in danger of being crushed two large groups of people already wearing orange life jackets had emerged from the nearby dunes and rushed towards the sea. In all there were probably 80 or 100 people. But when the first "taxi-boat" - used by the smuggling gangs to collect passengers from various points along the French coast - sped past perhaps 100m from the shore, it was clearly full already and did not stop to pick anyone else up.A few minutes later, a second boat, with almost no passengers, came towards the shore, watched by a French coastguard boat further into the English Channel. Initially, people were ushered forwards in organised groups, holding hands, and directed by one man who appeared to be leading events. But as the inflatable boat turned and reversed towards the shore, there was a scrum as dozens of people scrambled to climb aboard in water that was at least waist first the gendarmes declined to intervene and stood watching from the shore. One officer repeated a now-familiar explanation to me - that they were barred from going into the water except to rescue people. But as the situation became increasingly chaotic, the officers at the scene clearly felt that a line had been crossed, that those on board were now in danger, and that there was a brief opportunity to disable the boat in relative safety and while any smugglers - who might have fought back - were distracted by their attempts to restart the a policeman slashed repeatedly at the rubber, there were cries and shouts of anger and frustration from some of those onboard. A young girl, who had been in the middle of the scrum, squashed at the stern of the boat close to the engine, was plucked to safety as others scrambled on to the nearby later the boat was dragged ashore by the police as the migrants began collecting items they had dropped on the beach and then headed inland, up the sandy paths through the dunes towards the nearest village and a bus-ride back to the migrant camps further north.
