600 migrants are rescued from Mediterranean in just one day

NEARly 600 migrants were rescued in just one day as they tried to cross the Mediterranean to Spain from Morocco.

They had travelled on 15 vessels including toy paddleboats and a jetski on Wednesday. The 593 picked up by Spanish coastguards included 35 children and a baby and were among the steady flow of migrants crossing the Strait of Gibraltar and Alboran Sea in the western Med.

It came as Spanish police smashed a gang of people smugglers using jetskis to bring migrants into the country.

The traffickers charged each desperate migrant around £4,500 for passage into Europe from North Africa. The gang made the crossing by jetski every day, taking people to beaches in the provinces of Malaga and Cadiz. The migrants were then taken to Algeciras, west of Gibraltar, where they were held while the criminals checked families back home had paid.

Two migrants were taken on each jetski for the crossing across the Strait of Gibraltar. ‘The high number of boats coming to the Spanish coast this summer is unusual,’ said a spokesman for Spain’s coastguards yesterday, adding that there were three times as many as in the same period last year.

The UN says more than 9,000 people have arrived in Spain so far this year – three times as many as the previous year.

Many are sailing across the eight-mile Strait of Gibraltar and choose cheap, childsize paddle boats without motors. The majority are West Africans, with Nigeria, Guinea and Ivory Coast the main countries of origin. But Bangladeshis have also been leaving North Africa in their thousands.

Unlike Syrians, Iraqis or Afghans arriving in Europe, these groups are mostly treated as economic migrants, rather than refugees.

Spain could overtake Greece this year in the number of migrants arriving by sea, the UN said this month. However, the number of migrants arriving still pales in comparison with the number reaching Italy, which has seen more than 97,300 people arrive this year.

In July the number crossing to Italy dropped by 57 per cent compared with the previous month, according to EU border agency Frontex.

The fall was attributed to bad weather and better patrols by libyan coastguards.