Soldiers 'drowned' 30 migrants

2008-05-07 15:08

Madrid - Moroccan soldiers deliberately sank a boat containing would be migrants trying to reach Spain, drowning about 30 people, survivors of the incident were quoted as saying by a Spanish newspaper on Wednesday.

El Pais quoted "at least five survivors" as saying between 29 and 33 migrants, four of them children, drowned off Al-Hoceima, northeast Morocco, on April 28 after the soldiers punctured their inflatable boat.

A Moroccan security source told AFP on Monday that 10 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa had drowned when three vessels sank off Al-Hoceima on April 28. A Moroccan non-government group quoted survivors as saying 36 had died.

El Pais said the survivors were taken to the border with Algeria, and Moroccan authorities have tried to cover up the tragedy.

Jabbed a knife into the rubber

Around 70 migrants left Morocco at around 03:00 on April 28 in a bid to reach Spain, the newspaper said.

Two hours later, they came across a Moroccan naval vessel and soldiers approached the migrants in a motor launch.

"One of the soldiers jabbed a knife into the rubber and told us 'now go to Spain if you want,'" El Pais quoted one of survivors, identified as Campos, as saying in the eastern Moroccan border town of Oujda.

"We tried to patch it up and we continued on with difficulty, but I think that we would have made it if they had not returned," said another survivor, Erick O, a Nigerian fisherman who said his wife and three-year-old daughter were among those who drowned.

Threatened the migrants

The Moroccan launch returned and a soldier began threatening the migrants with a knife.

"We asked them to take us back with them to Morocco because, with the boat in the state it was, it was almost impossible to continue," said Campos. "We begged them to look at our children and babies."

A Moroccan officer then took the knife and "punctured the boat four times in different places," following which it sank in a few seconds.

Another Moroccan launch came to help the drowning migrants, El Pais said.

A Spanish human rights group has said more than 900 would-be migrants died at sea trying to reach Spain in 2007, the majority at the start of their journey close to the coast of north Africa.

- AFP