By Tito Drago
MADRID, Jan 2 2003 (IPS)

The number of undocumented immigrants attempting to enter Spain continues to grow along with the number of people who die in the attempt. On Thursday, five bodies were recovered after a motorised rubber boat carrying at least 35 people from North Africa sank off the coast of southern Spain.

Government sources reported that the bodies were recovered by Civil Guard divers off the coast of the southern city of Tarifa, in the Mediterranean sea near the Strait of Gibraltar.

In the past five years, more than 4,000 people have lost their lives at sea in the attempt to make it into Europe through Spain, according to the Association of Immigrant Moroccan Workers in Spain (ATIME).

But Spain’s Interior Ministry has documented around 3900 such deaths, because its statistics do not include would-be immigrants who drown in Moroccan waters or those who go missing after their boats sink.

The five corpses found Thursday carried no identity documents, and the 27 survivors of the shipwreck who were taken into custody provided no information on them.

The majority of immigrants who die in the attempt to illegally enter Spain are victims of drowning. However there are also other kinds of accidents, such as one that cost the lives of four young Moroccans hidden inside a refrigerator truck last August.

The truck, which originally set out from the city of Casablanca on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, disembarked in southern Spain and drove all the way to the city of San Sebastián in northeastern Spain before the driver discovered that the four men were dead.

The death of a fourth member of a group of 14 immigrants being held in a police station in the southwestern city of Malaga, where a fire broke out last Friday, was also reported Thursday.

According to the police, the fire was set by one of the detainees, Patrick Arhaban, who was arrested on charges of trafficking immigrants.

Human rights lawyer José Luis Rodríguez with the non- governmental organisation Malaga Acoge (Malaga Gives Refuge) offered the detainees his legal assistance, especially to clarify why the immigrants were being held in a prison cell along with Arhaban and Abdel Abderraman, the owner of the boat in which they were riding.

The incident in Malaga triggered protests and demands for an investigation into why the immigrants were thrown into jail when according to Spanish law they should have been held in one of the reception centres for undocumented immigrants.

”Detained Moroccans are treated worse than pigs sent to slaughter,” ATIME spokesman Mustafa El’Merabet told IPS.

José Chamizo, ombudsman for Andalusia, the southern region where Malaga is located, said the incident in the jail made one suspect that the general feeling was that ”since they were immigrants, it didn’t matter what was done with them.”

According to Spanish legislation, undocumented immigrants intercepted at sea before they set foot on Spanish soil or on land before they cross the border can be sent back to their country of origin within 72 hours.

During that time they can be held in local police stations, but once the time limit is up, they must be released.

However, immigrants who make it into Spain without an entry visa must be held in reception centres before their cases are taken up by a judge. They can be held there for 40 days, after which they must be deported.

But it is difficult to enforce the laws in the case of illegal immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, most of whom refuse to identify themselves and reveal their nationalities when they are detained.

Moreover, Spain lacks deportation agreements with most sub- Saharan African nations.

More than 200 undocumented immigrants were intercepted along the coasts of Spain in the past week and over 30,000 in the past two years.

On Tuesday alone, 102 immigrants and three owners of the five boats in which they were travelling were captured on the shores of Fuerteventura and Lanzarote islands in Spain’s Canary Islands, located off the northwestern coast of Africa.

A majority of the immigrants came from the West Arican nations of Mali and Gambia, although others were from Ghana, Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania.

The boats they were riding in were ”pateras” – duck-hunting boats – typically used by people smugglers in the Strait of Gibraltar as they can outmaneuver Coast Guard vessels along the shore and can be navigated in shallow waters.

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