African parents are flying to Spain and abandoning their children in a cruel new tactic to reach Europe, with authorities saying the youngsters can one day try to bring relatives over.
A welfare council chief in Menorca has revealed two youngsters were left at a bus station before their mums and dads jetted home.
According to a local newspaper, one was an 11-year-old from Morocco and the other a 16-year-old from Senegal. It said the younger boy was taken to a children’s home in Menorca a day after reaching the island.
The Senegalese boy, said to have flown to the island with his dad, reportedly walked into a police station in the capital, Mahon, after spending several days on the streets.
Privately, officials have said they are not ruling out the possibility that the youngsters could try to bring other family members to live with them in Europe once they turn 18.
Officials in Ibiza also said that two children there were recently left on the island by their parents and given instructions to head to a police station so they could receive refugee treatment.
Carolina Escandell, Ibiza Council’s Welfare Minister, raged: ‘This is child abandonment and if they were Spanish the parents would be reported.’
Her Menorca equivalent Carmen Reynes said overnight: ‘We have expressed our concern because as well as having to cope with migrants arriving by sea, this new phenomenon now has to be taken into account. It could have a knock-on effect.’
All four children are now being looked over by institutions on the islands their parents left them on.
The two said to have been abandoned in Ibiza in recent weeks are understood to hail from North Africa.
It is not known if the youngsters left in Menorca are from Morocco or Algeria, or are sub-Saharan Africans.
Record numbers of undocumented migrants have reached the Balearic Islands, which include Majorca and Formentera, as well as Menorca and Ibiza, already this year by boat.
There has been an influx of migrants arriving in Spain in recent months. This image is for illustrative purposes and does not show any of the children abandoned
Most risked their lives by making the dangerous crossing from Algeria on rickety wooden boats called pateras.
A patera with 27 sub-Saharan Africans on board was intercepted off one of the islands on Sunday.
A ten-year-old boy was abandoned by his West African-born parents at Barcelona’s El Prat airport in July, although that shock case is not thought to have been linked to the latest ones involving children being dumped in Europe by their mums and dads as part of a feared new migration trend.
Reports at the time said the parents flying out of Barcelona were worried they wouldn’t get into Morocco because their son didn’t have a visa – and tried to leave Spain with his three-year-old brother after asking a relative to travel to the airport to take care of the older sibling.
They are understood to have been stopped by police before they got on their flight.
The immigration issue has led to tension in regions of Spain like the Balearic Islands, where the right-wing governs regionally and is at loggerheads with the central left-wing coalition government.
In June, Spanish police confirmed they had launched an investigation after the bodies of five migrants were found in the sea off the Balearic Islands with their hands and feet bound.
Initial speculation centred on the possibility they could have been murdered and thrown overboard.
The families of the men who died, all Somalians, later revealed they were shackled in a death ritual after they perished from starvation as they tried to reach Europe.
Several immigrants arrive in Spain after a boat was rescued by Spanish authorities on October 4
They had been on a boat that was rescued on May 8 by Spanish coastguards 62 miles from Alicante, with 16 male survivors suffering dehydration and other health problems and a dead man on board.
The vessel had left Algeria a fortnight earlier before it was left adrift following engine problems.
During their trip, they ended up having to eat just one date a day and drink their own urine, with the men whose bodies were recovered from the Mediterranean said to have fatally opted to drink seawater to try to survive.
Red Cross chiefs said after their rescue: ‘One of the people rescued had eaten toothpaste because it was the only thing he had.
‘He didn’t want to let go of the tube when he reached dry land.’
Yesterday, it emerged that an undocumented migrant had made history by becoming the first person to reach Spain’s north African enclave of Ceuta by paragliding across its heavily-fortified border fence from Morocco.