Spanish maritime rescue said on Sunday they had found four dead aboard a migrant boat originally carrying 34 people, off the Canary Islands.
A few hours earlier, a merchant ship had rescued a single survivor overnight.
The NGO for the defense of migrants Caminando Fronteras indicated on Twitter that it had received a distress call from this same boat on September 24, a few hours after it left the coast of Western Sahara “with 34 people on board “. Therefore, 29 passengers are missing.
“A New Tragedy”
“On September 24, we received an alert about this ship that had just left the coast at dawn south of El Aaiún,” said Helena Maleno, from Caminando Fronteras.
After a week without news, a boat was sighted in the south of the Canary Islands with “a totally exhausted 26-year-old man and four bodies on board. Hours later we learned that it was the boat that was leaving with 34 people on board.” She explained.
“The other 29 were swallowed by the ocean […] a new tragedy in one of the most dangerous routes for migrants, the route of the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago located in the Atlantic, off the coast of Morocco, he added.
978 people died trying to cross
The boat was found by Spanish maritime rescue about 280 km from the island of Gran Canaria.
Since the beginning of the year, some 11,500 migrants have managed to cross to the Canary Islands from Africa, according to figures from the Spanish government as of September 15. According to Walking Borders, 978 people died trying to cross.
At its shortest point, the Moroccan coast is only 100 km from the Canary Islands. But most of the migrants come from further south, some from Mauritania, 1,000 km away. The path is particularly dangerous because the ocean has many currents.
The number of migrants trying to cross has started to rise sharply since late 2019, when increased patrols in the Mediterranean reduced crossings there.
Source: BFM TV
