Five illegal migrants, two of them minors, were arrested earlier this week in Dijon after seriously injuring a police officer at a train station.
The incident took place in the early afternoon on Monday at the Dijon railway station when a worker for France’s state-owned railway company, the SNCF, called the police after several people were found to be without valid tickets and had become aggressive.
According to a Friday report from the news website Actu17, when the police officers arrived on the scene, the five suspects continued to be aggressive and fought with the officers as they were being arrested.
One of the officers had his fingers dislocated and his hand seriously injured, requiring hospital treatment and three weeks of incapacity leave from work.
Two of these five, a 17-year-old Algerian girl and a 15-year-old migrant, were taken to a children’s court, with the latter accused of stealing shoes from a train. The remaining three adults, two Algerians and a Moroccan, had the cases referred to the local prosecutor’s office.
The case is just the latest in a trend of criminality from migrants from the North African, or Maghreb, countries.
According to a report presented by French MPs Jean-François Eliaou and Antoine Savignat, migrants from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia account for 75 per cent of the minor migrants arrested in Paris, but many may be lying about their age.
The Directorate of Security of the Paris Metropolitan Area (DSPAP) found that of the 229 “underage” migrants they had positively identified by working with police in North Africa, 94 per cent of them were actually adults.
Valérie Martineau, director of local security in the Paris metropolitan area, stated that minor migrants were becoming increasingly more violent and committing robberies, many carry knives, and some even carry firearms.
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