WELCOME TO SPAIN! Bizarre scene as boatload of migrants washes up in middle of a holiday beach
HOLIDAYMAKERS scattered as dozens of African migrants poured out of an inflatable dinghy and on to a Spanish beach.
The men leapt out of the boat and into the surf before dashing over the sands where scores of families had been playing.
The group are believed to be mostly sub-Saharan Africans, who had crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco.
Tourist families, including young children, were swimming, sunbathing or strolling along the beach when the group arrived. One bewildered onlooker asked: ‘What’s going on?’
The migrants made the ten-mile crossing on Wednesday and landed on Germans Beach near the fashionable windswept resort of Tarifa in southern Spain at 2pm. By the time police arrived the men had scattered. They were still at large last night.
Footage of their arrival emerged as the International Organization for Migration warned that the number of migrants arriving by sea in Spain could overtake Greece for the first time this year.
Spanish coastguards rescued ten men from sub-Saharan Africa who were stranded in a rickety boat off Tarifa yesterday.
Fifteen more were rescued from two boats in the same area early on Wednesday morning.
And on the same day, 12 migrants used jet-skis to reach the Spanish territory of Ceuta in northern Morocco. A man of 28 from Guinea drowned before he could be rescued, officials said.
Most migrants attempting to reach Europe by sea still cross the Mediterranean in overcrowded fishing boats from Libya to Italy.
Almost 100,000 have made this journey so far this year – although the numbers are down from the previous year.
Some 8,200 have arrived in Spain so far this year – triple the number who arrived in the same period last year, according to the IOM.
While the figure pales in comparison with arrivals in Italy, Spain is catching up with Greece where 11,713 have arrived by sea in the same timeframe. ‘It’s possible that Spain will outperform Greece this year,’ IOM spokesman Joel Millman said. ‘If so, that’s a big change.’
He said many people taking the long route towards Italy via the Sahara and Libya and the Mediterranean were from west Africa.
But with the dangers faced, some may be deciding to go up along the west coast of north Africa instead. The sea crossing is much shorter and the route avoids having to sail from lawless Libya.
‘We assume that some of the change is due to the fact that the route is considered a safe route up to the coast through Morocco,’ Mr Millman said.
He added that the boats crossing the short but choppy sea to Spain were much smaller than those launching from Libya to Italy.
In Libya there ‘appears to be a very deliberate strategy to put people out there, in overloaded
‘One large wave and they can flip over’
boats that begin to take on water almost immediately and then it’s a race to see how quickly the people on the boat can summon aid,’ he said. ‘Whereas in Spain, the strategy is smaller craft hoping to come in undetected, and undoubtedly some do.’
The stretch of Spanish coast targeted by the migrants is not far up the coast from the popular resorts of the Costa Del Sol.
The bodies of 25 migrants have been recovered from the Gibraltar Strait this year. Officials believe the total number of deaths is likely to be far higher.
Krzysztof Borowski, of European Union’s border agency Frontex, said many of the tiny boats used to reach Spain are not designed for choppy seas.
‘The use of these playthings is troubling ... one large wave and they can flip over and leave people in danger,’ he said. ‘These toy boats are very hard to spot at sea for rescue operations.’
Smugglers charge up to £3,000 per migrant to take them on the 30-minute crossing from Morocco to southern Spain in dinghies or on jet-skis.
Meanwhile, around 700 Africans attempted to reach Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta yesterday – but none were able to breach the border crossing.
They tried to scale the 20ft barbed wire fences around Ceuta before being forced back by Moroccan and Spanish police.
In the early hours of Monday, 300 African migrants to get into Ceuta by storming a border crossing. Of these, 186 men made it across. They were rounded up and taken to a reception centre.
■ Some 180 young Ethiopian and Somali migrants were forced off a boat into rough seas off Yemen by people smugglers yesterday – and 55 drowned, the IOM said. On Wednesday another 50 were ‘deliberately drowned’ when a smuggler forced 120 teenagers and young men off his boat.