This last week, the Med has been offering perfect conditions for attempting crossings from Africa in embarkations of dubious seaworthiness. It only takes a couple of hours.

The fact is, that over 400 immigrants have come ashore in Motril Port, rescued by the Guardia Civil Maritime Service, in the last month.

Now, all these ‘arrivals’ have to be processed and housed, and therein lies the problem; so saturated have the CIE’s become that they had no other option than to let the latest arrivals, some 97 immigrants, simply catch a bus and disappear.

Once an immigrant is brought into the port, they stay there for a maximum of 72 hours before passing on to one of eight internment centres around the county: CIE stands for Centro de Internamiento de Extranjeros.

These CIE‘s are not prisons, but the inmates are kept there until their repatriation can be arranged, which is invariably complicated because illegal immigrants take care to carry no identification papers on them so that the Spanish authorities cannot determine their country of origin and send them back.

In the case of these last 97 immigrants, who arrived on Sunday the 2nd, the police bundled them into minibuses and drove them to the bus station – it’s as simply as that.

La Cruz Roja pointed out that they can’t simply kick them out of the port facilities and let them wander the streets, so they take them to the bus station, give them the means to phone home or relations in Spain, and wave them a fond farewell.

Anyway, it will be the Brit residents put on a buses soon, the way that things are going back in the UK…

Finally, one of the recent arrivals was an albino (featured in the photo), fleeing persecution in his homeland, where they are murdered and their organs sold as talismans, etc. If there is one guy who deserves a break, it was this man.

(News: Motril, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)