Refugee Siege Stops French Rail Freight

The French state railway operator, SNCF, said yesterday it was accepting no new UK-bound freight traffic because of the huge backlog caused by nightly break-ins at its Calais yard by would-be illegal immigrants to Britain.

"We do not envisage permanently suspending freight traffic through the Channel tunnel, but at the moment it is all we can do to clear what we already have," an SNCF spokeswoman said. "I have no idea how long it will take."

A British rail freight company warned that the decision risked 8,000 jobs. Graham Smith, planning director of English Welsh Scottish Railways, told BBC radio: "It's getting absolutely farcical. Here we are trying to operate an international rail freight business, a fundamental plank of the government's transport strategy, and we are just being prevented from doing it because the French authorities will not put enough security into the Calais area."

He said EWS was losing £500,000 a week - altogether £6m so far.

"Our customers are leaving us in droves because they have to get their goods moved, and the customer representative group has estimated that 8,000 jobs could be at risk, both directly in the rail freight industry and our suppliers, but also the people who rely on international rail freight to support their business."

The SNCF spokeswoman said freight traffic through the tunnel had been reduced at the end of last year to five or six trains a day from 25 as a result of the asylum seekers' increasingly desperate attempts to reach Britain.

But so many would-be immigrants from the nearby Red Cross camp at Sangatte had stormed the operator's Frethun freight yard over the past two days that only one train was able to leave on Monday and two on Tuesday.

During the course of those two nights, transport police arrested a total of 420 people who had broken into the compound in an attempt to smuggle themselves on to a goods train bound for Britain, the spokeswoman said.

It is understood that a meeting between the SNCF, police, local government representatives and the justice and interior ministries has been called for Monday to discuss the problem, which the SNCF spokeswoman described as "fast becoming unmanageable".

Nearly 8,000 would-be illegal immigrants have been arrested at Frethun or on SNCF freight trains since the beginning of the year, compared to 7,400 in the whole of 2001. "The situation is exceptionally difficult," she said. "Every train that leaves the terminal has to be searched with sniffer dogs. The locomotive has to be changed just before the train enters the tunnel, which gives the refugees another opportunity to jump on board and means the train has to be searched again.

"There are more than 80 transport police on duty at any one time but the whole process still takes hours. The train that left on Monday night was scheduled to go at 5pm and it eventually went through at 4am - it was beseiged by immigrants on seven separate occasions."

The Sangatte centre, which is barely a mile from the mouth of the Channel tunnel, houses up to 1,700 refugees, mainly Afghans and Kurds, intent on reaching Britain. Its proximity to the tunnel has become a serious bone of contention between the British and French governments.

London says the centre attracts tens of thousands of illegal immigrants to the Channel coast, while Paris argues that it is Britain's relatively lenient immigration laws that act like a magnet and that the refugees must be looked after on humanitarian grounds.

The tunnel operator, Eurotunnel, has been to court in France twice in vain attempts to get the camp closed.