Trench riot police it sac
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• The rumour on the picket line was that the CRS would strike at 04:00hrs, but it was not until an hour later that we saw four figures running from the next bridge, writes CM correspondent Chris Lewis, who saw French riot police attempt to clear a 200-truck blockade near Lille on Monday night.
"Its arrivent," French truckers shouted as both carriageways of the darkened highway blazed into a mass of flashing blue lights.
There was a cacophony of air horns. Someone threw a lasttyre onto the picket line brazier in a futile gesture of defiance. The Lille police chief invited the strikers to come out and look atthe hardware at his disposal.
It was a start of a tense negotiating game that was to last until lunchtime: foreign drivers caught up in the blockage were unwilling to move without safe-conduct guarantees from the police. At one stage, with the negotiations apparently stalled, a tank tried to tow a single truck away, pulling the tractor unit apart.