At roughly 4:44 a.m. PST this morning, RCMP tactical units in approximately 11 vehicles breached the Wet’suwet’en camp at the 39-kilometre mark of the Morice Forest Service Road.
Six people were arrested and later released. According to one eyewitness, the police arrived with guns drawn and pointed down, and when one person wouldn’t exit their truck, officers smashed the truck’s window to get to them.
The camp, which is roughly 10 metres away from the road, is being dismantled and the RCMP are presumably now on their way to raid the camp at the 44-kilometre mark. The legal justification for dismantling the camp is uncertain, given the injunction refers to access to the road.
Ricochet journalist Jerome Turner is embedded in the 44-kilometre camp, and we’re providing live updates from him via our Twitter account: @ricochet_en.
Turner attempted to cross the RCMP checkpoint shortly before 7 p.m. PST last night. He was turned back, despite having the same letter of accreditation and photo ID he had used to cross the checkpoint three times in the past two weeks. Editors with Ricochet pushed back with the RCMP, and he was finally let through on a second attempt several hours later.
Unconfirmed reports on Twitter indicate that journalists attempting to access the area this morning are being turned back, leaving Turner as one of the only journalists reporting on this raid in real time.
This is a developing story. More to come.
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- Crossing the RCMP checkpoint on Wet’suwet’en territory
- Why having a journalist on the ground at Unist’ot’en matters
