The body of an eight-month-old baby who died in the sinking of a boat carrying immigrants in the Mediterranean has been found on a beach in Catalonia, Spain, local authorities said Tuesday.
According to the Civil Guard, the baby was traveling in one of the precarious boats known in Spain as “pateras” that try to reach European coasts from North Africa.
The boy’s body, already in a state of decomposition, was found on July 11 on Roda de Verà beach, in Tarragona, by municipal agents.
According to testimonies cited by Spanish media, the body had already been in the place for a few days, but due to the position in which it was found, it had been confused with a doll.
In a statement, the Civil Guard said that the body was identified as that of an Algerian baby of about eight months who drowned, like her parents, in the shipwreck of a ship off the Spanish Balearic Islands.
The girl could be identified by crossing the DNA with that of the body of a woman found on April 6 on the Balearic coast, the experts concluding that they were daughter and mother.
According to the Civil Guard, the boat had left Cherchell, Algeria, on March 21, with 15 migrants on board, and sank after having drifted for weeks in the Mediterranean.
None of the 15 people on board survived and, so far, Spanish authorities have found or recovered eight bodies, including that of the baby identified today.
Nearly a thousand people have already died in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean in the first six months of this year trying to reach Spain from North Africa, the non-governmental organization (NGO) Caminhando Fronteiras reported on July 6.
The Spanish NGO, which collects data from official sources and from migrant communities and other social organizations on the ground, records 951 victims between January and June, an average of five deaths per day in documented shipwrecks and in 19 boats lost at sea with all people on board reported missing.
Among the dead were 112 women and 49 children and the victims came from 14 African countries and the Middle East, according to data collected by Caminhando Fronteiras.
Most of the victims were identified on the so-called “Canary Islands route” in the Atlantic, between the west African coast and the Spanish Canary Islands archipelago, where 778 people died in the first half of the year in “28 tragedies” involving ships.
The other shipwrecks with fatalities occurred in the Mediterranean, between the coasts of Algeria and Morocco and those of Spain.
“Among the causes that caused tragedies and victims in this period, we highlight once again the omission of the duty to help, the delay in the activation of the search and rescue means, the insufficiency of the means when they are activated, the bad practices during the bailouts and the lack of coordination between the Spanish and Moroccan states, whose relations are governed by geopolitical interests linked to migration control and not by the defense of the right to life,” the NGO Caminhando Fronteiras wrote in a statement.
Spain, along with Italy, Greece or Malta, is known as one of the “front line” countries in terms of arrivals of irregular immigrants to Europe.
Source: TSF
