ARCHIVED - Four-year prison sentence for captain of boat transporting illegal immigrants to Almeria
The man was found guilty of an offence against foreigners’ rights for captaining a boat with 106 illegal migrants from Algeria on board.
A four-year prison sentence for a man caught at the helm of a boat full of illegal migrants has been ratified by the Andalusian High Court (TSJA).
The 12-metre fishing-style boat containing 106 illegal migrants set sail from Beni Saf in Algeria at 3 am on 30 November 2019, without any safety equipment or food supplies for the crossing on board.
A Guardia Civil coastal patrol detected the ‘patera’, with 106 migrants - 11 of them children including 7 under the age of 8 - on board, at 7 pm.
At that point, the defendant, who had been captaining the boat and reading the compass with the help of 2 other, unidentified people, began to throw anything which could help to identify himself as being in charge of the boat, overboard.
He told the migrants travelling in the boat that if the police asked, they should say that they had bought the boat between them and taken it in turns to handle it; he was NOT the captain.
The boat and its passengers, was taken into Almeria fishing harbour, but suffered damage on route due to bad sea and weather conditions.
Despite his attempts to masquerade as one of the migrants, the court confirmed that the defendant had acted as the captain of the boat in full knowledge of the fact that the migrants would be clandestinely entering Spanish territory, circumventing border controls and thus violating immigration legislation.
This is a fairly common occurrence, as those captaining the boats are invariably given a prison sentence if they can be identified as part of the mafia gang illegally transporting irregular migrants, so frequently it is impossible to ascertain which of the travellers has captained the boat; those travelling are generally paying for their transport and are afraid of reprisals should they identify the person in charge of the boat.
In the past it was common for Algerian migrants to buy a boat between them in which to make the trip, but in the last few years organised criminal gangs have taken on this role and earn considerable amounts of money arranging every aspect and every stage of the journey from Algeria into Europe.
Recently the tactic has involved sending several boats at the same time in order to try and ensure that some boats reach the coastline without being detected by the coastguard.
Image: Archive