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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Migrants keep crossing Strait of Gibraltar despite bad weather

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Tarifa, Spain: A radio message comes in from a Spanish maritime rescue boat to the service’s command centre in the southern town of Tarifa: “34 migrants rescued.”


The onset of autumn, with the cold, storms and fog, has not stopped migrants from crossing the Mediterranean from Morocco to Spain, a journey that has this year claimed the lives of hundreds of youths.


From the heights of Tarifa, veteran sailors work in shifts behind radar screens at the rescue service command centre monitoring the Strait of Gibraltar, through which 100,000 ships transit every year. “When the weather is good we can see homes in North Africa from here,” said its head, Adolfo Serrano.


Just 14 kilometres separates northern Morocco from Spain’s southern Andalusia region at the Strait’s narrowest point.


“But with a quickly changing sea, strong currents, fogs that can surprise you, it’s a dangerous crossing,” added Serrano. It is especially perilous because human traffickers put migrants on packed inflatable boats or plastic canoes that can easily overturn, he said.


“I can’t remember an autumn like this. Boats keep arriving with pregnant women, children,” said Jose Antonio Parra, a mechanic of 25 years experience with the Guardia Civil police force’s maritime unit.


The 34 migrants rescued from an inflatable boat — including six females who appeared to be in their teens — were taken to the port of Algeciras, where they were first attended to by the Red Cross before being handed to police.


Small migrant boats are hard to detect by radar. They are often only located when the migrants themselves sound the alarm by telephone. Rescuers did not detect the boat which sunk on November 5 during a storm off the coast of the town of Barbate, an hour’s drive west of Algeciras, killing 23 young Moroccans.


Only 21 people on board survived. “There was a hell of a storm. Many of them did not know how to swim,” said spokesman for the Guardia Civil in Cadiz province, Manuel Gonzalez.


Andalusia’s regional government took charge of nine minors who survived, while police jailed two passengers suspected of having steered the boat. The other 10 adults who were on board were ordered back to Morocco under an agreement between Madrid and Rabat.


Since then, more bodies have washed ashore on other beaches.


Nine sub-Saharan African migrants drowned after spending a week adrift at sea, according to the only survivor of the ordeal, a Guinean teenager who saw his brother die, said Gonzalez. — AFP



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