Refugees set French Calais Jungle on fire

Migrants with their suitcases leave the shanty town in northern Calais, France, on October 24, 2016.

About 4,000 of an estimated 7,000 migrants have been moved out of the camp and transported throughout France since Monday.

Steve Barbet, a spokesman for the regional prefecture, said Wednesday that one migrant was slightly injured and taken to the Calais hospital.

The registered unaccompanied minors, majority male teenagers, are housed in a semi-permanent shipping container area next to the “Jungle” camp while they wait for French and British asylum experts to process them.

It is “really important, especially now when things are so chaotic there, that we keep these children safe and we make sure that they get the opportunity that they deserve to go on from there”, she said.

Migrants had set businesses up there, including restaurants, cafes and hair salons, and many saw the camp as a symbols of migrants’ resilience, as much as one of crisis.

The asylum-seekers who left the camp are being sent to asylum centers in France by bus after completing their registration procedures.

Calais prefect Fabienne Buccio told a press conference that four Afghan migrants had been arrested over the fires, and that authorities planned to have moved everyone out of the camp by the end of the day.

Residents of the camp were still milling around the site after the announcement, but authorities said they would stop processing people by Wednesday evening local time.

On Tuesday, 372 minors were registered and there are now understood to be around 800 in the container camp.

Local officials announced the destruction of the camp, where thousands fleeing war and poverty have lived in squalor as they waited for a chance to journey across the English Channel into Britain.

A group of young volunteers from several countries, who have for the past three days stationed themselves to monitor for fires in the camp, rushed to the first large fire set Wednesday. One aid group’s truck burst into flames.

The worst fires took hold from around 12.30am, when two gas canister exploded, and the violence “then took a more serious turn”, said Philippe Mignonnet, the deputy mayor of Calais.

Crews had begun dismantling the Jungle with sledgehammers on Tuesday.

London and Paris have been at odds over the fate of about 1,300 unaccompanied child migrants.

He said: “We don’t care about problems that are to come after this”. “We want to go to England and England only”. They told police they were trying to reach Western Europe.

Additionally, Save the Children, a charity with a focus on assisting minors, has shared their concerns in regards to the hundreds of minors who have not been able to register for shelters and have nowhere safe following demolition.