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52 illegal migrants drown
05/12/2006 08:26 - (SA)
Algiers - Fifty two Sahrawis drowned last week off the coast of Boujdour, in Western Sahara, said a member of the Polisario separatist group on Monday.
Mohamed El-Amin Ahmed, a Polisario leader, said those who drowned, including nine children younger than 11, were on a makeshift boat heading for Spain's Canary Islands.
The shipwreck had not been confirmed by other sources.
The ethnic Sahrawi official said that Polisario had written to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Saturday to ask for the opening of an "international inquiry" into the circumstances of the shipwreck.
Authorities said the bodies of 11 clandestine Moroccan migrants were found on the coast south of El Ayoun, capital of the northwest African territory of Western Sahara, after their boat sank.
Illegal migrants from sub-Saharan countries and Morocco often tried to reach the Canary Islands from the coasts of Western Sahara or Mauritania after the boosting of surveillance of the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla north of Morocco and in the Strait of Gibraltar.
Morocco annexed Western Sahara in 1975 and declared it part of the country after Spain abandoned control of the territory, triggering an armed separatist resistance from the Polisario, which was backed by Algiers.
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