Daily Mail
April 8, 2014
Hundreds of migrants desperate to get to Britain are living in squalid conditions in a growing camp in Calais that it is feared is becoming the new Sangatte.
More than 600 refugees are now living in the French town with most living just yards from the port in the camp, which has poor sanitation and where men fight for food.
The camp is a reminder of the Red Cross camp at Sangatte where as many as 2,000 immigrants were gathered before it was shut down in 2002 after sparking a British immigration crisis.
After the closure, Britain accepted hundreds of migrants in a deal with the French government and the number of asylum seekers living in Calais fell to just 100 by 2012.
But in the last two years the number has increased six-fold and French charities are now warning they are struggling to feed them all.
At the main camp on a disused railway line next to the perimeter of the main port where ferries go to Dover there are now 135 tents. Most are occupied more two or more people and there are further smaller camps nearby.
The migrants, who round the clock take turns to try and jump on UK-bound lorries on the roads leading to the port, huddle around camp fires during the evening.
The camp is littered with bits of rubbish and many of the tents are in poor condition.
The hundreds of migrants have had to share just three portable toilets next to the site since a toilet block was torched. The door to one of the toilets has been torn off.
There are no showers so the men have to wash themselves with bottles of water.
The barbed-wire fence that separates the camp from the busy port is used as a washing line to dry clothes.
Each evening, French charity workers come to serve pasta, rice and vegetables, which have been donated, but food is scarce.
Mahade Katab, 28, who lives at the camp, said: ‘I have seen men fighting each other for food. Sometimes they just fight out of boredom. It is horrible.’
Last week, the Mail revealed how four migrants trying to get to Britain from Calais had died in just one week earlier this month.
An Albanian man was killed on the motorway outside Calais on 9 March in the first of the deaths. Three days later, an Ethiopian named as Mesfin Germa was hit by a lorry as he walked along the main road to the port.
On 14 March the dead body of a 25-year-old Ethiopian man called Senay Berthay was found in the Batellerie dock at the port. The emergency services were called after his head was spotted bobbing on top of the water.
The next day another Ethiopian man in his 20s died while hiding on a car transporter. It is thought he had been among a group of three men who got on the truck and then realised it was going in the wrong direction.
Migrants boasted about how the lack of police meant they were certain they would get to England and told how even if they were caught they would just be released immediately able to try again.
The Mail witnessed as gangs of migrants gathered in two locations in daylight and used extremely desperate and dangerous methods to get into lorries without any police intervention.