French police evict refugees from Paris tent camp

Police in France have evacuated about 1,000 refugees, mostly Afghans and Sudanese, from a tent camp in northeast Paris.

Nearly 350 police were participating in the operation along with some 100 municipal employees and staff from humanitarian groups on Tuesday.

The refugees were reportedly living in squalid conditions at the Porte de la Chapelle area in Paris.

Paris police said in a statement that these “illegal camps” presented “major risks for the security and health of their occupants as well as for local residents.”

Police halted road traffic on a major crossroads in the north of Paris in order to gain access to the camp, where clashes between refugees last month left several people wounded.

In November last year, French authorities launched a similar operation, evacuating thousands of refugees from a squalid camp in Paris that had doubled in size after the closure of the Calais refugee camp in northern France.

More than 1.1 million refugees, most of them fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and North Africa, flocked to Europe in 2015. The flow subsided to quarter of a million last year after the EU reached a deal with Turkey in March 2016 to take all people landing on Greek islands in return for financial aid to Ankara and the lifting of short-term visa requirements for Turks.