Almost 1,000 Africans arrive in Canaries

Almost 1,000 illegal immigrants have arrived in the Canary Islands in just over a day and the regional president yesterday called the tide of African boat people Spain's worst humanitarian crisis since its Civil War.

The record rate of arrivals, compared with 4,751 in all of 2005, came as Spain's government said it would seek to make a joint proposal on immigration with France and Italy at the next EU summit in Finland on October 20.

A poll by radio station Cadena Ser showed that 89 per cent of Spaniards thought too many immigrants were arriving, after months in which footage of exhausted Africans arriving in overcrowded wooden boats have dominated daily news bulletins.

"This is Spain's worst humanitarian crisis since the Civil War," said Adan Martin, president of the Canaries' regional government, referring to the bloody 1930s conflict. A total of 930 would-be migrants, who risked their lives in a dangerous sea journey hugging the coast from West Africa, arrived in the Canaries in just over 24 hours up to yesterday morning, the islands' emergency services said.

Spain's Socialist government has asked for European Union help to stem the flow and has warned African countries such as Senegal that it is fed up with their lack of cooperation in accepting back their repatriated citizens.

Spain wants the European Union to provide more aid for policing the seas and wants a European policy on marine patrols.

Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has agreed with his Italian counterpart Romano Prodi to present a joint proposal with France, although a Spanish official said it was too early to say what this would be.

But the European Commission has said Spain is partly to blame for tempting poor Africans to try their luck with a mass amnesty of illegal immigrants last year.

Currently, almost all Africans arriving illegally in the Canaries refuse to reveal their nationality in order to avoid repatriation. They are then flown to mainland Spain after a few weeks where they are released after being given a piece of paper requesting they leave the country.

Meanwhile on another front, Libya is saying the EU is taking the wrong tack on immigration. Europe should stop criticising Libya for being a jump-off point for illegal immigrants and help it patrol its land borders to stem the traffic, Libya's European affairs minister was quoted as saying yesterday.

Abdulati Alobidi told two Italian newspapers that Europe put too much emphasis on trying to stop immigrants as they cross the Mediterranean Sea and should instead provide helicopters and off-road vehicles to stop the traffic from sub-Saharan Africa.

"Our European friends - I'm not referring to Italy - don't really understand the scale of the problem," Mr Alobidi said in interviews in Corriere della Sera and La Stampa.

"They don't realise that it won't be resolved by patrolling the sea, but that we need to start at the southern border, the transit point for migrant flow from their countries of origin."

Libya has 4,000 km of land borders, Mr Alobidi said, and it needed help from Europe to stop the flow of migrants from poverty stricken countries south of the Sahara desert.

Every year, tens of thousands of migrants risk their lives crossing the sea from Libya, often in small fishing boats or rubber dinghies, trying to enter the EU via the Italian island of Lampedusa, mainland Sicily or Malta.

The European Union's border security agency Frontex is due to start a sea patrol of the Mediterranean south of Italy later this month. Mr Alobidi said it was "unacceptable" that the EU had decided to launch that patrol without consulting Libya.