Elements of the Royal Navy intercepted, on Tuesday afternoon off the coast of the Driouch province, a boat with 57 sub-Saharan migrants on board, it was indicated by local authorities.

The sub-Saharan migrants, including women and children (8 under 10 years old), were intercepted at sea a few kilometres from the coast of the Dar Kabdani commune, the same source specifies.

The lifeless bodies of three migrants among the 57 on the boat were discovered, it is specified.

It should be noted that this is the first time in a few months that the Moroccan authorities have reported such an attempt at clandestine emigration. The controls operated on both sides of the Strait, both by land and sea, and the economic crisis hitting Europe seem to have evaporated the dreams of candidates for the journey towards an Eldorado that is no longer one.

The images broadcast in the autumn of 2005 by the media on the wave of violence that had followed the massive attempts by sub-Saharan migrants to cross the fences of the occupied presidios of Sebta and Mellilia are now part of a bygone past. Morocco is, in fact, no longer the main starting point for most attempts at clandestine entry into Spain from the South, nor an important operational base for the networks that control clandestine immigration trafficking. Other countries around the Mediterranean have stolen this sad privilege from it.

On the other hand, it has become one of the main receptacles for this emigration which began in the mid-1980s, and whose intensity has increased since the beginning of the 1990s.

Morocco, which has always been faithful to its vocation as a country of emigration, has become a transit point from the South to the North, or even a territory of immigration for these migrants from countries south of the Sahara before becoming a land of asylum. A phenomenon that seems to be taking on greater proportions, especially since the clandestine immigration of sub-Saharans is the consequence of the conjunction of a set of economic, political, and regulatory factors whose acuteness is growing and whose solution requires acting on the root causes that generate and maintain it, and this through a process of sustained development in the countries of departure. Only at this price will this phenomenon dry up.