Police suspected they had fallen on evidence of gang warfare when the decomposing bodies of four young men were found in a canal north of Valencia last week. The bodies were badly cut and bruised, and water in their lungs showed they had been thrown, still alive, into the canal a week earlier.
Although the men have still not been identified - and fingerprints show they have no police record - it is now believed that they were not part of any drug gang, but were just four more casualties in a growing and sinister operation smuggling unfortunate African immigrants to what they hope will be a better life in Europe.
Police now believe that the cuts and bruising, found to be only superficial, were caused when the four, desperate for air and squeezed into a tiny compartment in some stifling truck, fought and struggled for breath. The fact that one of the men had a handful of the hair of another adds strength to this theory. They believe that, on realising what had happened to his human cargo, the driver threw their semi or unconscious bodies into the muddy waters of the canal.
Earlier this year 11 men died and seven more were badly cut and mutilated when a truck, with false licence plates, overturned on the motorway north of Barcelona. The victims, Moroccans and Algerians, had been hidden in a specially built compartment behind pallets of empty glass bottles.
An accident in the same area last week, when a small van overturned fortunately without serious casualties, brought to light another illegal immigrant-run . A Moroccan who broke a leg in the accident told police they had paid their life savings of £3,000 each to be taken to France. It is believed that 10 managed to escape.
To avoid the immigration restrictions imposed by the EU Schengen Agreement, would-be immigrants pay large sums of money to be transported across the Straits of Gibraltar to Spain, and from there 1,000 km to the French border in specially camouflaged trucks hidden among legitimate cargo. On Monday night Spanish Coast Guards intercepted three small inshore fishing boats, carrying about 50 men and women, at Tarifa near Algeciras. One of the pateras capsized and as many as 12 people disappeared, although some of them could have swum ashore.
Each year hundreds of men and some women, mostly from North Africa, try to cross the treacherous waters which separate Africa from Europe, and each year dozens die in the attempt while dozens more are detained and deported. On a recent visit to Tarifa, I counted no fewer than seven of these fragile open boats, no bigger than large rowing boats, washed up on the beach. No one knows how many of their passengers made their way ashore, or how many drowned.