BISSAU, April 30 (Reuters) - Authorities in Guinea-Bissau on Monday detained 112 African illegal migrants who were preparing to leave for Spain in a boat from the small West African nation. Interior Minister Baciro Dabo said the 112 people rounded up by coastguards at dawn came from Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Gambia and Guinea and included a 14-year-old boy. It was the latest interception in what Spanish police and international migration experts fear will be a renewed wave of departures this summer from West Africa of illegal job-seekers trying to reach Europe via the Spanish Canary islands. More than 30,000 illegal migrants, mostly from Sub-Saharan Africa, came ashore last year in the Canaries after making long, risky voyages in rickety, open wooden boats. Hundreds die in the attempt, through drowning, thirst, hunger or exposure. But thousands are prepared to risk death to escape Africa's poverty and find a better life in Europe. "This kind of clandestine migration involves enormous risks and our government is really worried about the situation," Dabo told reporters. One of those detained on Monday, Mamadu Aliu Diallo from Guinea-Bissau, told the authorities he had paid 180,000 CFA francs ($373.5) for the trip to a Senegalese migrant-trafficker, who had escaped arrest. Spain has deployed patrol vessels and aircraft off the West African coast to try to intercept the migrant boats. Since last year, Madrid has launched a diplomatic offensive in the region offering governments increased aid in exchange for their help to prevent the migrant departures. It has also appealed for more assistance from its European Union partners. Guinea-Bissau, one of the poorest countries in the world, has a jagged unsupervised coastline of islands, river deltas and mangrove creeks offering numerous hidden departure sites. United Nations experts on organised crime say the former Portuguese colony is already being used as a transhipment point for cocaine and other narcotics being smuggled to Europe by plane and boat by Latin American drug cartels. Last week, 89 African migrants who were rescued from their sinking wooden boat off Mauritania while trying to reach the Canaries were put ashore in Senegal by a Spanish hospital ship.
