The Alicante police are now investigating a series of calls which have caused a great deal of time to be wasted by the police and other emergency services.Two boats ,a plane and two helicopters were deployed to search for a small boat which was reported to be lost off the coast of Alicante.There were supposed to be 12 people on board.There was no boat found and the search was called off.
Police are now trying to ascertain whether this mobile phone is the same one which was used to make other calls alerting the emergency services .One was alerting police to the arrival of illegal immigrants.Another claimed that a boat was about to sink a few miles from Cartagena.The first was in French and came from Villajoyosa ,the second was in Arabic and it and several other calls came from Murcia.
The police are now considering two options.One is that the calls were straightforward hoax calls and the other is that they were done deliberately to keep the police in one area while criminal activities such as the landing of illegal immigrants were taking place.If these were nhoax calls then whoever made them,should they be caught ,will be charged with making false reports.These search operations are very expensive to carry out.
