British News Agency

Authorities want to clear homeless people from the streets and slums to make the city look better for the Games, aid agencies said.

Police evicted hundreds of people from France's largest slum in a southern suburb of Paris, prompting fresh accusations from aid organizations that authorities are trying to clear the capital of refugees, asylum seekers and homeless people ahead of the Olympics.

The squat, located in an abandoned bus company headquarters in Vitry-sur-Seine, was home to some 450 people, most of whom had refugee status, legal papers and jobs in France but could not find suitable housing.
The early morning eviction, carried out by police in riot gear, came as France celebrated 100 days until the start of the Paris Games.

Some 300 people left the slum in Vitry-sur-Seine calmly, taking their belongings as around 250 police and gendarmes arrived. More than 100 more left before dawn. Many of the residents were put on buses to be taken to the city of Orléans or to the southwestern city of Bordeaux.

Many of those living in the derelict building said they did not want to leave the Paris region because they had jobs there.

Among the 450 people living in the slum were 50 women and 20 children. At least 10 children were attending local schools.

The number of people living in the slum doubled last year after hundreds of asylum seekers, refugees and homeless people were evicted from another slum in Île-Saint-Denis, near the Olympic Village.

Paul Alauzy of the humanitarian organization Médecins du Monde provided medical care in the Vitry-sur-Seine slum for three years. He is also the spokesperson for Revers de la Médaille (The Other Side of the Medal), a collective of charities and aid workers who warned that the Olympics were affecting the most vulnerable homeless in the Paris region.