Fearing Calais migrant influx, Belgium makes checks on French border

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Belgium is setting up border checks along its frontier with France to avoid migrants bound for Britain choosing the country as a transit point, as a large camp near the French city of Calais is set to be cleared, Belgium's interior minister said. Belgium has started deploying some 250 to 290 police officers to make checks at crossings with France, especially near the coast, as well as near the cargo port of Zeebrugge. The locations where the checks would be carried out would be chosen by police and evaluated daily, the minister said. "We already see movement of migrants from Calais toward our country," Interior Minister Jan Jambon told a press conference in Brussels. "Once the camps in France are cleared we could potentially see thousands." Authorities near the Belgian coast intercepted 950 Britain-bound migrants in January, up from 360 in November, the provincial governor of West Flanders said. Three quarters of those intercepted were either of Iraqi or Iranian origin. Migrants caught by the police checks would be told to immediately leave the country. The minister stressed that the border checks were targeted at the coastal region and would not have consequences for other crossings. "Belgium is not closing its borders, that's not what this is about, we are making targeted checks against a specific phenomenon," Jambon said. An increasing number of European Union states, most recently Austria, are tightening national borders, threatening to undermine Europe's free-travel Schengen zone. (Reporting by Robert-Jan Bartunek; editing by Barbara Lewis and Dominic Evans)