Italian authorities now claim that French police not only dropped off adult migrants in an Italian border town but may have done the same to underage migrants, as well.
Italian Interior Ministry sources have claimed that investigators operating in the town of Clavière on the French border have said that underage migrants have been shipped across the border by French authorities, Il Giornale reports.
According to the sources, French police are believed to have transported minor migrants to Italy on October 18th at around 10:30 pm but were blocked by Italian authorities at the time.
Human rights group Amnesty International claims that several days earlier, on the 12th and 13th, their volunteers observed French police engaging in the same process of rejecting a group of 26 migrants at the Montgenèvre border police station.
“There were 26 rejections from the border police station of Montgenèvre towards Clavière, the first Italian town, without any individual examination of their situation and preventing them from applying for asylum, but above all it did not bother them that eight of them were minors and could not be sent back that way,” the group said.
French authorities denied the allegations on Wednesday, after they had admitted last week that their Gendarmes had dropped off migrants in the Italian town, claiming they had made the mistake because they had not been assigned to that area for long.
The excuse was not good enough for Salvini who criticised the French, saying: “What happened to Clavière is an unprecedented offence against our country.”
“Who were these immigrants? Where did they come from? Why were they abandoned? And again: for civilian Paris, is it normal to dump people in the woods? Why do the French speak of ‘Gendarmes who did not know the way,’ if the van returned to their country at great speed and without hesitation?” he noted.
The border town has become the latest battleground between populist Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini and French President Emmanuel Macron on the migration issue with Salvini recently sending more police to the area, saying: “Update on Clavière, no more kidding around! I sent patrols.”