Raft boat of immigrants attacks Spanish patrol boat with Molotov cocktails
El País
April 10, 2007
The authors of the attack, which took place four days ago in territorial waters of Mauritania, arrived on Sunday to the island of Gran Canaria
The 57 immigrants who arrived last Sunday to the port of Arguineguín (SW of the island of Gran Canaria) used a new turn in the pressing tactiques of the phenomenon of immigration in wooden boats to the Canary Islands: they attacked the patrol boat
Río Duero of the Spanish Police (with base in Mauritania) with Molotov cocktails and other devices to avoid being intercepted.
The officers of the Spanish patrol ship decided not to respond to the attacks and to alert instead the control of European frontiers in the area, Frontex, which has its headquarters in the city of Las Palmas of Gran Canaria, allowing the raft boat to continue on its route.
The raft boat with the immigrants arrived on Sunday morning to the south of Gran Canaria. One of the patrol policemen who was aboard the Río Duero during the attack was taken to the spot to identify the immigrants. They will be deported to Mauritania in the following hours, where the country authorities have agreed to put them on trial since the attack took place within their territorial waters, near the town of Nuadibu.
The immigrants, of Sub-Saharan origin, left four days ago from the coasts of Mauritania. Like in other occasions, the Spanish patrol boat left to intercept the boat and to take them back to port. However, for the first time in the last 10 years the answer was not as expected.
In many occasions the Spanish agents destined to these rescue operations have valued the resignation in the reactions of the experienced sailors of these raft boats when they are intercepted, to the point that not one of them has tried to fly away in the last two years.
If the immigrants wanted to face the patrol boat they would only have to sail against it, like a torpedo, and the hard wood with which these raft boats is built would break the glass fiber hull of the Spanish patrol boat. But that would be a suicide move and they would risk to die in the water.
In this occasion the Spanish agents had to defend themselves from an attack with offensive devices and Molotov cocktails being launched from the raft boat.
On a second attempt to intercept the raft boat, the Spanish agents approached them in an inflatable dinghy to transboard the immigrants to the patrol boat. But the immigrants responded by showing sharp and pointy devices with which they tried to puncture the "rubber" dinghy of the agents. The movement of the immigrants in the raft boat was endangering their lifes, among which there were two underaged immigrants.
Due to the unusual of the situation and the impossibility to reppeal the attack without sinking the wooden raft, the officers of the Spanish police decided to let the raft boat --which had already reached the waters of Western Shara, controlled by Morocco-- leave and report it to Frontex.
A plane of Frontex followed the raft boat for the next four days until it was intercepted by the police in Spanish waters, and taken to the port of Arguineguín without more incidents.
The Spanish agents in Mauritania informed of the events to the authorities of Morocco. In a joint operation, a Spanish agent traveled to Gran Canaria yesterday to identify the attackers.
In spite that many of them already had new clothes given by the Red Cross, the agent could identify some of the authors of the attacks, who will be repatriated to Mauritania. The authorities of Mauritania have agreed to trial them, since the attack took place in their jurisdictional waters.
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