The rubbish-strewn beach at Hann, a suburb of Dakar, Senegal's capital, is packed with colourful, canoe-like pirogue fishing boats, ideal for smuggling lucrative human cargo. A dozen years ago the first ghastly scenes of drowned bodies washing up on European beaches featured pirogues from Hann and elsewhere that set out for the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago just 60 miles (100km) off the African coast. In 2007, 32,000 migrants reached them by sea. By 2010 the flow had slowed to a trickle, with fewer than 200 reaching the Canaries by sea most years since then. None came from Senegal.
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