Asylum-seekers overpower guards and storm Tunnel

French police arrested 130 asylum-seekers yesterday after they broke down a fence, stormed past Eurotunnel guards and invaded both bores of the Channel Tunnel, interrupting trains for 10 hours.

Another group of 400 refugees from the Sangatte holding camp close to the tunnel entrance were beaten back with tear gas when they attempted another mass invasion a few hours later.

The first incident occurred late on Christmas Day, but it was almost 7am yesterday before police and security guards announced that all the invaders – mostly Afghans and Kurds – had been captured and that traffic could resume.

Forty of the trespassers were being held in police cells while legal action was considered. The rest were returned to the Sangatte camp.

Eurotunnel officials said the mass trespass – the worst incident at the tunnel for several weeks – proved once again that the Red Cross camp at Sangatte, less than two miles from the tunnel mouth, was a threat to security. They called for the camp to be closed, something the French government has refused to do.

Because of the holidays, freight and passenger traffic was light, with no Eurostar trains operating between Paris and London. None the less, 80 cars and four coaches were forced to delay their journey to Britain and 30 cars were blocked at the Folkestone entrance. Scores of travellers spent the night in hotels in the Calais area and in Kent before resuming their journeys. Lorries were diverted on to cross-Channel ferries.

"This was a demonstration, rather than a genuine attempt to invade the tunnel," François Borel, of Eurotunnel, said. "They knew they couldn't walk all the way to England. That's obvious. It was a gesture of revolt to attract media attention." All the same, British police with sniffer dogs were called in to search the tunnel at the "international frontier" halfway between the two entrances.

Another Eurotunnel spokesman, Kevin Charles, said the incident reinforced Eurotunnel's case – still before the French courts – that the camp should be moved away from the tunnel entrance. "We have spent £5m on security arrangements so far and [the French] government has done nothing and left us in this situation where we have a refugee centre two kilometres from the tunnel," he said. "Most people agree this is pretty crazy."

Other Eurotunnel officials complained that the Sangatte camp should have warned them that two large crowds of refugees had left the camp. "We saw them coming on our CCTV cameras, but it was impossible to stop them," an official said. "We had approximately 20 guards there, but they had no chance."

The first crowd of refugees – mostly young men but also women and children – broke down a security fence and then overwhelmed the guards. They ran into the twin bores of the tunnel, but iron security gates were rapidly closed inside the tunnel and none of the invaders penetrated very far.

There are 1,200 refugees in Sangatte, mostly Afghans, Kurds and Iranians. The centre was opened two and a half years ago to house 600 people, but numbers rose as high as 1,600 last summer.

French authorities reject British arguments that the camp is the cause of the security problem at the tunnel. They point out that hundreds of refugees had begun to gather in Calais before the centre opened, attracted by the supposed generosity of British asylum laws and the prospect of finding work in an English-speaking country. The centre was created from an old Eurotunnel hangar to provide minimum comforts for refugees, then sleeping rough in the streets and parks of Calais.

Eurotunnel began an action in the French courts last summer, seeking to have the centre closed. The courts refused to grant an injunction against the government, but a final decision will be made early next year.