A gendarme was injured this Saturday morning with a stab in the hand during an intervention on a beach in Pas-de-Calais intended to prevent a group of refugees from setting sail for England, a- we learned from the gendarmerie. The gendarme, whose artery was affected, had to be operated on, said the commander of the Pas-de-Calais gendarmerie group, General Frantz Tavart.
The gendarmerie tries to identify the author of the blow among the sixty refugees, mostly men but also women and children. The facts occurred according to Frantz Tavart “in a certain crowd, in the middle of tear gas” used by the gendarmes in the face of an “immediately very virile” context.
In 2022, around 46,000 people crossed the English Channel in 2022 in small boats. Five died and four disappeared in these dangerous crossings, according to the count of the maritime prefecture. In November 2021, 27 people died in the sinking of their boat.
Gendarmes against NGOs
On Saturday around 7.20 a.m., in Oye-Plage, this gendarme received a stab wound in the hand while he was “trying to burst the boat” in which a group of around sixty refugees wanted to attempt the crossing of the Channel, he told AFP. He also pointed to “the increase in violence against the police” during these interventions against clandestine crossings, reporting that a gendarme had received “batons” in similar circumstances two days earlier. The gendarmerie destroyed, according to him, three boats in this same sector during the night from Friday to Saturday.
Amélie Moyart, coordinator of Utopia 56 for the Grande-Synthe area, where several hundred refugees live waiting to cross to Great Britain, for her part told AFP that a group of around fifty of refugees had called the association on Saturday morning. Drenched, they said their boat had been slashed when they were already in the water, she said.
The firefighters then asked the association to provide dry clothes to a couple with a 20-month-old baby, who remained behind the group. In a state of hypothermia, this family was taken by firefighters to Calais hospital.