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Morocco continues mass deportations

RABAT, Morocco - Moroccan authorities flew 435 illegal immigrants home Saturday, starting a second wave of mass deportations of sub-Saharan Africans who have tried to slip into Europe through the North African kingdom.

The Senegalese and Malian immigrants were sent home from Goulimine, a town about 500 miles south of Morocco's capital, Rabat, the official MAP news agency quoted Goulimine Gov. Ahmed Hamdi as saying. Three flights took off from a military base in the town.

The flights marked a second wave of deportations that started in the eastern city of Oujda, on the border with Algeria.

Nearly 1,600 immigrants were sent home in the first wave, including many who tried to reach the Spanish enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta in northern Morocco but were pushed back from barbed wire fences.

On Sept. 29, five immigrants were shot to death while trying to get into Ceuta, and six more died in clashes with Moroccan security forces at the Melilla border last week.

SOS Racismo, a nongovernmental organization in Spain tracking the immigrants, said that some 1,000 people had been rounded up at the Goulimine military base, meaning more flights could be expected.

The rushes on the fences and the mass deportations that followed have drawn the world's attention to an immigration crisis that has long plagued Morocco.

Morocco denied claims by the rebel Polisario Front that it had abandoned hundreds of immigrants in the Western Sahara desert.

The allegations risked increasing long-running tensions between Morocco and neighboring Algeria, which backs the Polisario's efforts to make the Western Saharan territory independent.

"No migrant ... was left in the desert or abandoned to his own fate at the southern frontiers of the kingdom," MAP quoted the Interior Ministry as saying Friday.

The ministry also took aim at Algeria, saying its border with Morocco had become a "sieve" for illegal immigrants.

The Polisario claimed it found hundreds of immigrants in a part of the disputed territory that it controls, the Polisario news agency reported Friday.

The Polisario Front ambassador to Algeria, Mohamed Beissat, said he knew of about 150 immigrants found in the Western Sahara.

Their feet had been injured from walking and some had been beaten, Beissat told the Associated Press in Algiers.

Morocco has also come under criticism from the Paris-based humanitarian group Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, for allegedly abandoning migrants in desert areas south of Oujda.

[Last modified October 17, 2005, 01:19:13]