Quelle: Vice

By Pierre Longeray

French police boarded a train that had just crossed into the country from Italy on Sunday night and detained around 100 migrants, a move that sparked a protest where several pro-migrant activists were also arrested.

The train carrying the migrants was stopped at around 10:50pm local time in Menton, a town in the southeast corner of France near the Italy border. French authorities returned the migrants to the border, where they were taken to shelters in the Italian town of Ventimiglia.

„A hundred migrants, accompanied by [migrant advocacy group] No Border activists, took the last regional train out of Ventimiglia to reach France,“ Martine Landry, who oversees the local Amnesty International chapter and runs a migrant shelter in Menton, told VICE News.

Landry said the migrants were arrested after „riot police boarded every train carriage simultaneously and made migrants disembark.“

According to Landry, a spontaneous demonstration erupted outside the Menton train station around 4am on Monday morning, leading to the arrest of 17 Italian No Border activists. The activists, who were mainly students, were taken to the police station in Ventimiglia and released Monday. They were reportedly banned from returning to Ventimiglia for three years.
Authorities in the nearby city of Nice confirmed that three French activists who were also arrested at the demonstration remained in custody Monday on charges of disrupting the public order.