Woman 'threatens to slash her wrists' as police move in to demolish camp

Calais 'jungle': Woman 'threatens to slash her wrists' as police move in to demolish camp 

Pregnant migrant threatens to slash her wrists as riot police move in to demolish shacks in squalid shanty town in Calais known as the Jungle

A pregnant migrant threatened to slash her wrists as riot police moved in to demolish shacks in the squalid shanty town in Calais known as the Jungle, where thousands of refugees live as they wait for a chance to sneak onto a lorry and get into Britain.
The woman, believed to be a Kurd from Iran, climbed on to the roof of a shack early on Tuesday as police and demolition workers began their second day of operations to clear the southern part of the sprawling camp.
When police arrived to remove her and a man, believed to be her husband, from the roof, she waved a knife in the air and threatened to slash her wrists.But police officers quickly scaled a ladder and forcibly removed the couple. They were later released and had suffered no injuries, local officials said.

The incident underlined the heightened tensions in the Jungle, where authorities on Monday began a weeks-long operation to clear the southern part of the camp, which covers half the settlement built on a former toxic waste dump on the outskirts of Calais.On the first day of the operation, refugees, who are mostly from Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa, set fire to some tents and stoned police who responded with volleys of tear gas grenades.
A few shacks were burned on Tuesday as bulldozers and workers methodically carried out their demolition work, but there were no confrontations between police and migrants, who looked on in the bitter cold and rain as their former homes were pulled down.

One Sudanese man, who declined to give his name, watched as the police line moved slowly forward toward the small enclosure where he and a handful of compatriots lived.“I don’t know where I will go to sleep when they knock my house down,” he said.One of the options offered by the French state is to move into one of the containers recently installed in another part of the camp. But on Tuesday aid workers said the container settlement’s capacity of 1,500 people had now been filled.
The other option was to take a bus to a refugee centre elsewhere in France.Only a handful of migrants take up that offer each day, as most fear that this would force them to claim asylum in France and give up their hopes of travelling to Britain.Left-wing activists in the Jungle, many of whom are British, have been accused of falsely telling migrants that they will be sent back to their countries of origin if they agree to leave the camp.
On Tuesday, about 20 migrants agreed to take the bus option.“I don’t know where it is taking me,” said 24-year-old Hisseun Ibrahim, from Chad, as he climbed on board the vehicle.

The destination, according to Serge Szarzynski, the local official overseeing the bus transfers, was the Savoie region of eastern France and Marseille in the deep south.He said about 2,700 migrants from Calais had taken the bus option since last October, averaging about 40 a day.French officials say about 1,000 migrants will be affected by the Jungle eviction plan but aid organisations say more than 3,000 people live in the southern zone.

The clearance operation is the most dramatic step France has ever taken to end Calais’ migrant’ problem, which has festered for years, fuelling support for the the far-Right and causing tension with Britain.Britain has put substantial pressure on France to stem the flow of migrants getting across the Channel, and has funded a huge increase in security measures around the port and tunnel in Calais.
The Jungle has also played into fraught discussions about Britain's possible exit from the European Union.The demolition of the southern part of the camp comes ahead of talks on Thursday between French President Francois Hollande and David Cameron.

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