Oil tanker 'Alithini II' coming from Nigeria in the port of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria this Tuesday. Elvira Urquijo A. (EFE)
The Ministry of the Interior has re-examined this Wednesday the case of the third of the Nigerian citizens who arrived a week ago in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria hiding at the helm of an oil tanker and has authorized him to remain in Spain while his asylum request is resolved. which will be processed by the urgent procedure.
According to what the lawyers of Caminando Fronteras and the Secretariat of Migrations of the Bishopric of the Canary Islands, David Melián and María Vieyra, have informed EFE, their client will be immediately released and in the next few days he will have to appear before the Police so that they can provide him with his documents. of an applicant for international protection.
This man requested asylum from the hospital where he was recovering from dehydration after eleven days on the voyage and his two companions sued him when they were returned to the ship to be repatriated to Nigeria.
Until then, they were legally stowaways and it was up to the owner of the tanker, the Maltese ship
Alithini II, to
keep them in custody and return them to the port of origin, Lagos.
Last Monday, the three received negative responses to their asylum application.
However, in a matter of hours, Interior re-examined the case of the two whose file was most advanced, those represented by the Spanish Commission for Refugee Assistance (CEAR), and resolved to admit their protection requests for processing.
Although he did not yet go into the merits of the matter, the mere admission to processing already meant for both of them leaving the police stations where they were being held, leaving the legal framework of the stowaway and going to a resource from the humanitarian reception network of the Canary Islands.
The same will happen this Wednesday with the third of the applicants, the one represented by Caminando Fronteras and the Bishopric of the Canary Islands.
His re-examination took place this morning and with a precedent in his favor: a report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), an organization from which it is mandatory to ask for an opinion on these asylum procedures at the border.
UNHCR had ruled that none of the three met the profile of a refugee in the strict sense,
The sources consulted in the three organizations that have mobilized to receive them consider that the fact that the urgent procedure is applied to their requests may be due to this specific assumption of the law: the concurrence of "specific needs" in the people who request the protection of Spain.
The three men clandestinely got on the rudder blade of the Alithini II
on November 17 in the port of Lagos (Nigeria) ,
a ship of more than 180 meters in length, without previously knowing and without knowing with certainty where the ship was going or how many days they would be at sea.
They endured eleven days hidden in a hole under the stern where the rudder is inserted into the hull, almost without food and with water reserves that they lost on the first day, until the ship arrived at the port of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria at dawn on the 28th. of November.
It was the pilots at the port who discovered them and notified Salvamento Marítimo, which not only brought them to safety, but also took a photo of them, still sitting on the rudder blade, under the immense hull of the
Alithini
that has circumnavigated the world .
.