190 suspected Asian migrants arrive in Canary Islands

A fishing boat with around 190 suspected Asian immigrants has arrived in the Canary Islands, emergency services said today.

The boat, which had a Spanish flag, looked like a large fishing vessel and arrived undetected by radar south of the island of El Hierro last night.

Javier Armas, head of the emergency service in El Hierro, said staff had assisted 132 people, including two minors, and that four people were taken to the hospital with dehydration or hip injuries.

He also said that police were searching for 40 or 50 more immigrants who managed to escape.

Where the boat started had not been determined but most of those aboard, all men, were believed to have come from Pakistan, Armas said.

Under Spanish law, authorities have 40 days to identify and repatriate illegal migrants and must free them if the deadline is not met.

About 31,000 mostly African migrants fleeing poverty have reached Spain’s Canary Islands by boat in 2006, almost as many arrivals as in the previous four years combined.

Some 1,975 migrants have arrived in El Hierro, the smallest of the seven islands of the archipelago off west Africa with a population of 10,000.

The increase came despite the presence of EU sea and air patrols set up off the West African coast in recent months to try to curtail the tide of illegal immigrants.

The vast majority of immigrants sail from west Africa in crowded open boats, many perishing en route.

Others attempt to reach mainland Spain’s southern coast by crossing the Mediterranean from north Africa.

In September, the government said it had repatriated more than 73,000 illegal migrants this year, almost a fifth of whom were sub-Saharan Africans.