France allegedly attempted to send foreign minors back over the border to Italy last week under cover of darkness, but were thwarted by Italian authorities, sources at the interior ministry said on Tuesday.
The sources said that Italian officials stopped the attempted pushback of the child migrants on 18 October shortly after 10.30 pm during a visit by experts sent by the ministry to the northwestern town of Claviere, near the French border, where Italy alleges that a French police van recently dropped off two African migrants in a wooded area.
Salvini has confirmed there will be permanent patrols in the area and has asked his French counterpart Christophe Castaner to come to Rome for talks, the sources said. Technical staff are probing the alleged border violations, the staff added.
Prosecutors in Turin said last week they had opened a European judicial probe into "unknown persons for the transport of foreigners aimed at their illegal entry into Italy" over the alleged incident in Claviere on 12 October.
Tensions between France and Italy have risen in recent months as Rome has accused Paris of hypocrisy by refusing to take in "a fair share" of more than 700,000 migrants who have reached Italy by boat since 2014.
Italy in March protested to France over a incident in which French border police entered a clinic in the border town of Bardonecchia run by a non-governmental organisation that cares for migrants trying to cross the Alps, the foreign ministry said. Italian prosecutors are also probing that incident.
Also in March, French police in sparked outrage by carrying out identity checks at Bardonecchia station, with the Italian foreign ministry summoning the French ambassador to protest.
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