Man tried smuggling teen in car’s dashboard through Spain
A Moroccan man was arrested for trying to smuggle a 12-year-old boy into Spain by hiding him in his BMW’s dashboard – after guards detected his heartbeat using a special sensor, according to reports.
The 65-year-old man’s BMW X5 was stopped Friday at the border between northern Morocco and the Spanish city of Melilla, where the youngster – believed to be from Guinea – was found, the UK’s Sun reported.
Authorities using a device that screen vehicles for stowaways heard the boy’s heartbeat from inside the cramped dash, where he was experiencing breathing difficulties and numbness.
“He [the driver] was asked to open his (trunk) but nothing was found. When a heartbeat sensor was passed over the car, officers became suspicious. When officers detected the heartbeat, they took the expensive car to pieces,” a spokesman for the Spanish Civil Guard told the Times of London.
The driver of the Moroccan-plated Beemer was promptly arrested and was expected to appear before a judge.
Almost 18,000 migrants reached Spain by sea between the beginning of this year and mid-November, according to the UN’s International Organization for Migration, a three-fold increase from the same period last year, the paper reported.
About 158 migrants died making the crossing.
In July, a cop overpowered a knife-wielding man who shouted “Allahu Akbar” – Arabic for “God is great” – at the same border in Melilla.
And in August, a police officer’s leg was broken as he tried to stop almost 200 African migrants reaching Spain at the country’s other North African border in the neighboring enclave of Ceuta, according to The Sun.