Spanish coastguard rescues 600 migrants in 24 hours

SOME 600 migrants attempting to cross from Morocco to Spain have been rescued in just 24 hours amid a surge in arrivals on what has become the fastest growing sea route to Europe.

The Spanish coastguard said that 593 people had been pulled from 15 rafts on Wednesday, 424 of them in the Gibraltar Strait and 169 near Alborán, an island outpost midway between Spain and Morocco.

Two more rafts – one of them containing six children – were picked up in the Gibraltar Strait early yesterday.

The number of migrants arriving in Spain by sea has tripled this year and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has warned that the country could soon overtake Greece as the maritime gateway to Europe.

Since the start of 2017, more than 8,000 migrants have used the Morocco-spain route, compared with 2,500 during the same period last year.

The IOM says they may be choosing the route as it is “safer” due to a crackdown in Libya. The crossing from Libya to Italy, which remains by far the biggest with almost 100,000 arrivals, has seen more than 2,000 deaths this year. But the western route too has seen tragedies: in July, up to 50 migrants drowned when their rubber boat sank near Alborán. in June, the body of a child aged between eight and 10 was found on a beach in Almeria.

Last week, sunbathers near Cadiz were shocked to see a black rubber dinghy loaded with migrants landing on the beach, its occupants leaping from the vessel and running away.

Jose Maraver, head of the Spanish Coastguard centre in Tarifa, told The Daily Telegraph that such landings were a regular occurrence in the area.

He said that most migrants used flimsy, inflatable rafts without engines – “toy boats”, used to avoid expensive people-traffickers, that were not fit for the sea, making the challenges for the coastguard “very complicated”.

Migrants are said to be choosing increasingly inventive ways to reach Spain. This week, Spanish police said they had broken up a network using jet skis to transport migrants from Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the Moroccan coast, to the mainland.

The cost of the journey was around €5,000 (£4,500).