Mauritania arrests Polisario members and 51 candidates to illegal migration

Mauritanian police have arrested 4 "Polisario" members who used to organize illegal migration from northern Mauritania to Europe via Morocco, a reliable source said.

The arrest took place over the weekend in the city of Zouerate (830 km northwest of Nouakchott).

The police also seized several 4WD cars registered in the Lahmada camps, southern Algeria. The vehicles were used to transport candidates to illegal migration, the source said.

In the same development, the Mauritanian gendarmerie on Monday arrested in the locality of Bir Mogrein (Northeast of Zouerate) 51 candidates to illegal immigration from Subsaharan Africa.

Last month, the UN secretary general expressed concern over "an increasingly growing phenomenon of illegal migrants, transiting Western Sahara en route to Europe."

"The appearance in the heavily-mined buffer strip of clandestine migrants, groups of whom occasionally remain stranded there without proper means of sustainment for a long period of time, is a matter of growing concern. This is obviously part of a much broader phenomenon of trafficking in human beings through the region," Kofi Annan warned in his latest report on the Sahara to the security council.

The report which also recommended a 3-month extension of the UN Sahara mission (MINURSO) -deployed in the Sahara since 1991 to supervise a ceasefire concluded between Morocco and the Polisario- announced that last May, the Polisario informed MINURSO that a group of 23 people from Bangladesh and India had been provided shelter by its military forces near the MINURSO team site at Mijek.

In September, another group of 20 individuals from Pakistan had been found near the MINURSO Tifariti team site. In both instances, the individuals claimed that they had been abandoned in the desert by their guides, who had promised them passage to Europe.

Violent clashes over the control of clandestine migration gangs had opposed last October the Polisario members, leaving several victims near the Moroccan-Mauritanian borders.