A migrant encampment on the banks of the Roya River in Ventimiglia on the Italian-French border was dismantled on Wednesday on the orders of the mayor after a shooting incident on September 7, in which two migrants were injured.
Following a shooting incident in the night between September 6 and 7 near a migrant encampment on the banks of the Roya river in Ventimiglia on the Italian-French border, the city's mayor had vowed to take radical measures to "ensure security".
Two migrants had been injured in the shooting, one of whom seriously.
A few days later, Mayor Flavio Di Muro ordered the dismantling of the encampment, pledging to work to "stop the setting up of another camp".
Security forces intervened on Wednesday (September 10) morning at dawn, evacuating the zone to enable bulldozers to remove the tent city that had been created.
The intervention was reportedly decided in agreement with Imperia prefect Antonio Giaccari.
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35 migrants taken to police barracks to verify legality
After the dismantling, 35 migrants were taken to the police barracks to check whether they were in Italy legally.
"It was a fair and necessary intervention," said Di Muro, "not only after the latest events of the past few days, but also because this is an area under regulations that prohibit anyone, migrants included, of sleeping out in the open or creating unauthorized encampments. A bit of organization was needed, since the intervention was coordinated by the prefect's office, police station, security forces, and obviously the Ventimiglia municipality."
"We will meet soon with the prefect and the police commissioner, and we will find a way to create 24/7 monitoring in a dynamic manner so that encampments of this type do not happen again," the mayor said. "The idea is, in fact, not to clean up to have a living room available the next days."
"We are always ready," he warned, "and my bulldozer is never turned off."
In the September 7 shooting, two Tunisian migrants, aged 18 and 30, were injured. The younger was hospitalized at the Santa Corona di Pietra Ligure hospital in the Savona province for lesions to an artery caused by a bullet that penetrated his left thigh.
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