Nearly 500 additional police and gendarmes will be mobilized for checks on these “authorized crossing points”, in order to guarantee “H24 security”, according to the French police.
Reinforced controls at the Franco-Italian border, decided by Paris after Rome’s refusal to let the humanitarian ship Ocean Viking dock, have been effective since Thursday at “more than a dozen” crossing points, police said on Friday. French.
It is a question of “controlling the stations, the secondary axes in particular near Menton but also Sospel or Breil-sur-Roya (Alpes-Maritimes), the motorway axes, in particular the A8, the exits, tolls and areas of highway”, specified the General Directorate of the National Police (DGPN).
Control in Menton
Illustration at Menton Garavan station, the first from Ventimiglia, Italy, where each train is searched from top to bottom for long minutes “H24 and 7/7”, according to commissioner Emmanuelle Joubert who heads the Police in borders (PAF) in the Alpes-Maritimes.
This Friday, on the regional express train at 4:10 p.m., a 14-year-old boy had to get off the train. He left his town of Siguiri, in Guinea, to join France, without wanting to specify the date of his departure.
“That one, we take him to the border post and, as a minor, he will be handed over to a children’s home,” explained a police officer from the operational reserve.
“The more we are, the tighter the border will be”
Checks are also carried out on the road, at the two border posts in Menton. At the Saint-Louis post, the French police hand over to their Italian counterparts migrants who are refused entry into France.
This Friday, at the beginning of the afternoon, a dozen migrants who were notified of this non-admission thus recrossed the border on foot, heading for Italy, leaving the small barracks adjoining the border post whose reception conditions are regularly denounced by associations supporting refugees and defending human rights.
“The more we are, the more the border will be sealed”, estimates Emmanuelle Joubert, indicating that to date, more than 28,000 non-admissions (or refusal of entry) have already been notified to foreigners in an irregular situation in the Alps. -Maritimes since the beginning of the year.
Reinforcement of controls “over several departments”
Nearly 500 additional police and gendarmes will be mobilized for checks on these “authorized crossing points (PPA)”, in order to guarantee “H24 security”, according to the French police.
If most of the axes of entry of migrants to France are located in the Alpes-Maritimes, “which concentrate two thirds of non-admissions in 2022”, according to the DGPN, the strengthening of controls “extends nevertheless to several departments with mountain areas and the various major international axes”.
The device must be complete by Sunday and is “separate from the police mobilized to ensure the security and escorts of migrants from the Ocean Viking”, according to the DGPN.
After three weeks of wandering in vain in search of a safe port in Italy, the humanitarian ship Ocean Viking, carrying 230 migrants rescued from a shipwreck in the Mediterranean, was welcomed in France this Friday.
Tensions between France and Italy: reinforced border controls at around ten crossing points