Nine migrants drown trying to swim to Spanish enclave

Nine people drowned today as they, and some 200 other African migrants, tried to swim to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta from neighbouring Morocco, the Spanish government said.

Spain has two enclaves in the north African country, Ceuta and Mellila, and migrants regularly try to reach them either by swimming along the coast or climbing the triple walls that separate them from Morocco.

The bodies of eight men and one woman were recovered from Moroccan waters, the Spanish government representative in Ceuta said. The migrants had earlier tried to cross the razor-wire lined frontier, but gave up as Spanish police drove them back, the official said.

Every year thousands of African migrants try to reach the European coast, and there are rescues and drownings almost every week off Morocco.

Earlier, the Italian navy rescued more than 1,100 migrants from nine large rafts in the waters south of Sicily.

Patrol helicopters identified the overcrowded rafts yesterday and four navy vessels participated in the rescue which ended early today, a statement said. The navy gave no details about the nationalities of the migrants.

Italy is a major gateway into Europe for migrants, and sea arrivals more than tripled in 2013 from the previous year, fuelled by Syria's civil war and strife in the Horn of Africa.

In October of last year, 366 Eritreans drowned in a shipwreck near the shore of the Italian island of Lampedusa, which is located about halfway between Sicily and Tunisia. More than 200, mostly Syrians, died in another shipwreck a week later.

Over the past two decades, Italy, Greece and the Mediterranean island of Malta have borne the brunt of migrant flows and have urged the EU to make a more robust and coordinated response.

Reuters