Police in North Macedonia say they have found 43 migrants in an abandoned van shortly after the driver tried to evade a police block.

Police said in a statement on Saturday that a patrol stopped a van near the central town of Shtip on Thursday.

Police found 43 migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, aged 16 to 25, in the van. They are believed to have entered North Macedonia from Greece on their way to Serbia.

The migrants were detained and transferred to a shelter; they will be deported back to Greece.

The so-called Balkan route was shut down for migrants in 2016 after a huge spike in arrivals in 2015, but traffickers still use smuggling routes through the Balkans.

Meanwhile, a young African child has died off the coast of Spain after being rescued from a packed boat carrying 66 migrants, the maritime rescue services said.

Aged about six, the child died while being transported by helicopter to the southern coastal city of Almeria, said a spokeswoman, who was unable to say whether it was a girl or a boy, nor specify the nationality.

Rescuers located the boat in the Alboran Sea between Morocco and Spain in waters just off Motril, a town 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of Malaga, after being tipped off by the NGO Caminando Fronteras (“Walking Borders).”

Among those on board were 20 children and 14 women, one of whom was pregnant, the spokeswoman said.

 They were rescued by a patrol vessel from the European Union’s border agency Frontex, which called in urgent assistance for the child who “had a weak pulse and whose temperature was below 36˚C.”

The helicopter picked the child up with its mother and flew them to Almeria where they were met by an ambulance, by which point the child had died, she said.

The other rescued migrants disembarked at Malaga on Friday morning.

On Friday, Italy presented a scheme on Friday to accelerate the expulsion of migrants who have no right to stay in the country, cutting the time it takes to decide on whether an asylum seeker must return home.

Immigration flows helped fuel the rise of Italy’s far-right League party, whose leader Matteo Salvini imposed a crackdown on arrivals while he was interior minister until August.

Salvini closed Italy’s ports to migrant rescue ships, threatening the charities operating them with fines of up to 1 million euros ($1.10 million) if they tried to dock.

After the League unexpectedly quit the government in a failed bid to trigger an early election, its former ally the 5-Star Movement formed a coalition with the centre-left Democratic Party, ushering in a less aggressive approach to immigration.

The new government has already agreed with four other EU states a scheme to distribute people saved in the Mediterranean, and it hopes its plan to send back those already in Italy will defuse accusations by Salvini that it is soft on immigration.

“I do not believe that redistributing migrants to other European countries is the final solution”, 5-Star leader and Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio told a news conference.

Under the new decree, the time to examine asylum requests of migrants who come from a list of 13 “safe” European and African countries, including Tunisia and Albania, will be reduced from two years to four months.

If the request is rejected, the expulsion procedure will be immediately triggered.

“More than one third of those who arrived in Italy in 2019 comes from these countries,” Di Maio said.

Fewer than 8,000 migrants came to Italy by sea in 2019, down 62% from 2018 and down 92% compared to 2017, official data show. However, expulsions fell far short of Salvini’s electoral promises.

The League leader said he would repatriate 100,000 migrants in his first year in power, followed by another 400,000 during the rest of his five-year term in office, but Interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese told parliament this month that only 5,244 people had been repatriated this year up to Sept.22.

Agencies