An unprecedented battle began in a British court today seeking damages for 30,000 French-speaking Africans, in one of the world's biggest cases of alleged mass-poisoning through environmental pollution. Lawyers for…Trafigura failed in its initial attempts to exclude many witnesses from the trial over alleged toxic-waste dumping by the company…Mr Justice Macduff ruled that witnesses could testify from Amsterdam, where Trafigura faces prosecution over earlier attempts to dump the same waste, and from Tunisia and Norway, where efforts to treat Trafigura's foul-smelling waste led to other accidents and protests. Trafigura's counsel, Edwin Glasgow QC, used today's public hearing in Manchester to attack some of the 30,000 claimants' motives.