Channel Tunnel service resumes after 100 migrants ‘invade’ track

Full services would resume gradually, the company said, with a departure on the French side expected at about 10.00am.

According to the Telegraph, an estimated 5,000 migrants displaced from countries, like Syria, Libya and Eritrea, are now camping in and around Calais, with an aim to enter Britain, and around 150 people try to get into its terminal each night.

A spokesman for Eurotunnel said around 200 migrants broke into its French terminal and got onto the tracks.

But a small number managed to evade the Calais authorities to make it through the tunnel, only to be caught by British officers.

The “organized intrusion” happened at 12:30 a.m. local time Saturday, said John Keefe, Eurotunnel spokesman.

But by Saturday morning, services through the tunnel, which include the Eurostar train service and a shuttle service for vehicles, resumed.

“It’s clearly an organised attack when it comes in such a large number”, a Eurotunnel spokesperson said early on Saturday as quoted by Sky News.

The Eritrean man, who was in his 20s, was thought to have been hit by a freight train.

Elsewhere, border police were repairing a large breach of almost 30 metres (yards) in one of the many fences around the site.

The disruption was the latest in a series of incidents involving migrants who are camped around the northern in the hope of reaching Britain.

The Eurotunnel company had only recently installed more security measures to prevent refugees from entering the tracks, driving migrants and refugees to resort to more desperate measures. The number of attempted break-ins has fallen to around 100 per night, police say.

The interior ministers of France and Britain signed an agreement in August to set up a new “command and control centre” to tackle smuggling gangs in Calais, as Europe grapples with its biggest migration crisis since World War II.