French policemen Friday fired tear gas at protesting squatters during a drive to evict them from the site of a proposed new airport to be built on protected swampland. A policeman and two television journalists were slightly wounded as the angry protestors hurled bottles, stones and firecrackers at the estimated 500 policemen, an AFP correspondent said. The policeman had an injured hand and the journalists appeared to have mild head injuries.
The crackdown at Notre-Dame-Des-Landes, north of the western city of Nantes, came a day ahead of a planned protest that is expected to gather thousands of activists. Two excavators and a large waste receptacle were deployed to clear an area where the protestors had set up shacks at the 1,650-hectare (4,000-acre) site. The airport, which is scheduled to replace the current airport at Nantes in 2017, is a pet project of Socialist Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, who was the city's mayor from 1989 until this year.