Boat convoy of refugees docks in Spain

VALENCIA: The first boat in a naval convoy carrying a total of 629 rescued migrants arrived in the Spanish port of Valencia yesterday, ending a gruelling nineday sea voyage, but leaving wide open a fierce debate in Europe about how to handle immigration.

Spain swooped to help the group of mainly subSaharan Africans aboard Aquarius last week, offering the charityrun ship a berth 700 nautical miles away, after Italy and Malta refused to let it dock.

An Italian coastguard ship that took aboard some of the passengers off Aquarius to make the trip safer arrived soon after dawn in the eastern Spanish port, where a staff of 2320, including volunteers, translators and health officials, waited.

Uniformed police looked on as officials in white overalls and protective masks greeted the first migrants to step off the boat.

Aquarius itself, run by a FrancoGerman charity, and another vessel were expected to dock overnight.

The ship’s predicament gave Italy’s new government the chance to assert its antiimmigrant credentials, and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, in office for just over a week, took the opportunity to underline a more liberal stance.

But the plight of Aquarius has highlighted the European Union’s failure to agree on how to manage huge numbers of people fleeing poverty and conflict.

‘‘People are coming to Europe seeking European values of solidarity and support,’’ Red Cross Secretarygeneral Elhadj As Sy told a news conference in Valencia on Saturday.

‘‘Anything less than that is a betrayal [of] Europe itself.’’

Seven pregnant women aboard the vessels were to be immediately taken for checkups, and everyone on board, including 123 minors, would receive psychological help, Spanish Red Cross officials said.

Antimigrant feeling has surged in Italy. More than 600,000 people have arrived on its shores over the past five years, helping to propel the nationalist League into a coalition government.

Far fewer come to Spain, but the numbers are rising fast.

Most Spaniards support the idea of welcoming and helping to integrate refugees, pollsters say, allowing Sanchez, a socialist, to offer migrantfriendly policies to voters who feel previous governments did not do enough.

France, which chided Italy for turning away Aquarius, has offered to take any passengers who qualify for asylum and want to go there.

A Spain’s coastguard rescued 933 migrants and found four dead bodies in the Mediterranean over the weekend. The coastguard said on Twitter it had rescued 507 people from 59 small dinghies in the Gibraltar strait, where it also found the four bodies.

All the other rescues happened in the Alboran Sea, between northeastern Morocco and southeastern Spain. — Reuters