Spanish authorities announced on Thursday that they had rescued at least 350 migrants in five boats drifting off the Canary Islands in the past 24 hours, a day after a shipwreck that killed at least two people.
“During the night, the rescue services attended to 114 migrants who were traveling aboard two boats rescued by Spanish sea rescuers,” the rescue services of the Canary Islands, an archipelago located in the ocean, shared on Twitter with Northwest Africa Coast.
Those migrants were being cared for on the island of Lanzarote and Gran Canaria, where “a baby and his mother were taken to hospital for minor illnesses,” they added.
A third boat was rescued at dawn and its 54 passengers returned to Lanzarote, the same source said at the time.
Two other boats were rescued in the afternoon, a spokeswoman for the Spanish sea rescue service told AFP.
The first was sighted off the island of El Hierro, with 121 people on board, including six women and four children, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa. The second, a rubber dinghy about 13 kilometers from the island of Gran Canaria, with 61 people on board.
These new rescue operations come the day after a fatal shipwreck occurred about 160km off the coast of the island of Gran Canaria.
Spanish sea rescuers, who initially said they had recovered the body of a minor, told AFP they had found another body, that of a man.
Some 24 people rescued by Moroccan authorities on Wednesday have been taken to Morocco, said a spokeswoman for Spanish rescuers, who said she had no information on anyone missing after the shipwreck.
For its part, the Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras, which bases its assessments primarily on the statements of migrants or their families, announced on Wednesday that a total of 39 people died in this shipwreck, “including four women and a baby”. She assures that the boat has been asking for rescue for “more than twelve hours”.
Departures of migrant boats to the Canary Islands, often from the shores of the disputed territory of Western Sahara, have multiplied in recent days due to good weather conditions.
Since the tightening of controls in the Mediterranean, the migratory route to the Canary Islands, which lie in the Atlantic off the coast of north-west Africa, has been particularly busy. Shipwrecks are common here and the crossing can be particularly dangerous due to the strong currents and the condition of the boats.
On Tuesday, the lifeless body of a pregnant woman was found on board another boat with around fifty migrants off the Canary Islands.
About fifty Moroccan migrants have also been missing off the coast of southern Morocco for more than ten days after trying to board a secret boat to Spain, a source close to us learned on Thursday. from one of the missing.
In a report published in late 2022, Caminando Fronteras claimed that more than 11,200 migrants have died or disappeared since 2018 trying to reach Spain, which is one of the main gateways for illegal immigration in Spain. Europe. That’s an average of six a day.