Migration: The latest frontier for human traffickers – "ghost boats" travelling at 120 km/h

Friday, Nov 21, 2025

Il Sole 24 Ore

Fast, high-value smuggling boats evade Spanish authorities, posing significant operational and safety risks.

🔗 Read the article on ilsole24ore.com

[This is an automatically generated summary, for reference only]

A viral video from August showed a dark speedboat rapidly delivering migrants to shallow waters near Granada before immediately leaving, leading some outraged tourists to detain migrants until police arrived. Authorities confirmed the scale of this operation through a joint effort with Europol, resulting in 14 arrests and the seizure of 15 speedboats valued over one million euros. These fast boats, capable of reaching about 120 km/h, are described by some officials as “phantoms” because they are difficult to legally intercept. While the Spanish Civil Guard has introduced faster interception craft, authorities admit that the speed difference and the criminal networks’ evasive tactics make operations extremely complex and dangerous due to the risk of fatal encounters at high speeds.

🔗 Read the original article

Previous page Hair transplants are becoming increasingly popular in Poland and throughout Europe
Next page Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria have already reached agreements with the Norwegian Fund, while in Hungary, funding is currently only available to civil society organizations

© 2026 Pulse - Europe beyond the beat


PULSE is an initiative for cross-border collaborative journalism in Europe co-funded by the European Commission under Grant Agreement n. PO 4500158093.

PULSE is an initiative coordinated by OBCT that has been promoting intensive journalistic cross-border collaborations in Europe since 2024. Its main aim is to help strengthen the European public sphere by reporting on and telling stories from new and diverse perspectives.

At the heart of PULSE are 10 leading national news outlets (Delfi – Lithuania, Deník Referendum – Czechia, Der Standard – Austria, EfSyn – Greece, El Confidencial – Spain, Gazeta Wyborcza – Poland, HotNews – Romania, HVG – Hungary, Il Sole 24 Ore – Italy, Mediapool – Bulgaria) and three transnational organisations, including OBCT , n-ost and Voxeurop .

Additional outlets and journalists are involved as associate partners, including EUobserver , Føljeton (Denmark), H-Alter (Croatia), Levila (Estonia), Rubryka (Ukraine), and The Journal Investigates (Ireland).

PULSE is driven by a sort of virtual transnational newsroom made up of journalists from all the publications involved. It collaboratively produces new journalistic content on European issues on a daily basis, coming in many different languages. The editorial output amounts to over a thousand publications per year, mostly in article form.

PULSE also runs 4 thematic networks open to any European journalist interested in crucial issues such as EU enlargement, relations between the EU and other global powers, the EU’s green transition, or media and the information society. These networks function as online communities and periodically publish calls for pitches.