CNN report on Frankfurt Airport Boder camp.
 http://europe.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/08/03/germany.airport/index.html

Some 2,000 protesters were marching on Saturday to pressure the airport to close its refugee deportation centre when about 100 people broke off and tried to force their way into the terminal.

Police used batons and pepper spray to beat them back. Hundreds of riot police had been braced for conflicts with the marchers.

The clash came after protesters were met with razor wire, water cannon and riot police when they tried to march on a building housing the deportation centre.

Only air passengers with tickets were allowed into the airport, continental Europe's busiest, in an attempt to reduce problems caused by the action.


The demonstrators were calling for an end to Germany's policy of forced deportation after the deaths of several illegal immigrants.

The protesters are part of a group called No One is Illegal, supporting open borders, eased immigration laws and the immediate halt to deportations of illegal aliens.

At one point, 250 protesters stretched banners across the road outside the arrivals area, blocking traffic for about 20 minutes. Later, about 300 demonstrators tried to enter a terminal through a covered overpass bridge but were turned back by rows of riot police.

On Friday, several dozen activists briefly took over the Italian Tourist office in centre Frankfurt, calling for the release of 49 Germans who remain jailed in the Italian port city of Genoa, where they were arrested during protests at the July 20-22 Group of Eight summit.

They later moved to the neighbouring city of Offenbach, where they threw eggs, stones and bottles at a building where illegal immigrants are kept pending clarification of their asylum status.

Police later cleared them from the area with batons, injuring one protester.

Also on Friday protest organisers met asylum-seekers who accused police of assaulting them.

Mokltar Dahmane, an asylum-seeker from Algeria, told activists that he was mistreated by German border police as they tried to deport him in 1997, the Associated Press news agency reported.

He said: "They bound me with tape up to my neck and it was hard to breathe. I wasn't allowed to say anything at all."

Dahmane says he was flown from Germany to Italy, where authorities refused to admit him and returned him to Frankfurt. When he arrived in Germany again, Dahmane said border police beat him in the back and the stomach.

Dahmane has pressed charges against the police, but his lawyer Susanne Rohfleisch said he stands little chance in bringing the officers before a court.

In 1999 a Sudanese deportee died on a flight from Frankfurt. A medical expert has said the man suffocated because of the force with which German police officers pinned him in his seat during takeoff.

Border police officials have so far not commented on the allegations made by the illegal immigrants.

The German national carrier, Lufthansa, became a focus of the protests because of its contracts to take home nearly 10,000 rejected asylum-seekers a year.

The airline says it has recently strengthened its policy of turning down illegal immigrants who are bound or resisting deportation.