A SATELLITE system linking two continents became the latest weapon in Europe's armoury against illegal immigration yesterday, as police forces in countries as far apart as Spain, Senegal and Mauritania were hooked up to a single high-speed communications and data network.
The EU-funded Sea Horse system helps relocate the effort to prevent illegal immigration back to the coast of Africa, with stations opened in port cities such as Dakar, in Senegal; Praia, in Cape Verde; and Nouadhibou, in Mauritania.
The system should allow police in all the countries involved to track immigrant vessels in real time as they are spotted travelling up the Atlantic coast of Africa, and then veering west in search of the Canary Islands or heading north for the southern shores of Spain or Portugal.
Police can plot charts and draw up shared maps of where vessels carrying would-be illegal immigrants are going and what routes they follow.
"It is the most sophisticated network of its kind in Europe," Miguel Marquez of the company Indra, which has put Sea Horse together, said. "It uses technology that already existed but had never been applied to illegal immigration before."
The information is being centralised in the Canary Island capital of Las Palmas, where participating frontier police forces have formed a co-ordination centre. The system will receive information not just from individual police forces, but also from maritime patrols.
Spanish aircraft also patrol the waters between Africa and the Canary Islands, which has seen more than 100,000 immigrants land on its beaches in 2,800 boats since the new immigration route from west Africa opened up 14 years ago. Although 151 immigrants have arrived in the first week of this year, the co-operation of west African countries has allowed Spain to reduce numbers over recent years. -