Four migrants have died after being thrown from a speedboat off the coast of southern Spain.

The boat was yards away from a beach in Cadiz when the incident occurred, Guardia Civil police and rescue service said.

Thirty-one other people from the boat, including six children, survived the incident and four were taken to a hospital.

Officials said 27 passengers were forced out by the vessel’s drivers near Camposoto beach, which is where the four died.

Another eight were left on the shore of Sancti Petri beach, in nearby Chiclana, who were attended to by medics and the Guardia Civil police.

Three of them were taken to hospital suffering from hypothermia.

Eyewitness Javier Gonzalez told a local TV station: “We saw a drug trafficking boat arriving but they weren’t trafficking drugs but [were] with migrants.

“Suddenly, they began jumping and some were thrown. There are even images showing one of the bosses was pointing with a gun to a migrant, like saying, ‘you jump, or I shoot you’.”

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Gonzalez is a windsurfer who was at the time on the beach with a group of about 15 to 20 colleagues and helped rescue the migrants from the water.

“We went towards the guys, the migrants and by that time, within one minute or two, there were already three of them facing down,” he said. “What we did first was to take the ones facing down and then pulling the rest out.”

Cadiz is on the southern tip of Spain, around 12 miles (19km) from the North African coast.

It is not a common destination for migration routes from the Maghreb as it is located on the Atlantic coast where sea conditions are more complicated and there is a lot of surveillance in the Strait of Gibraltar.

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