According to an NGO, the search for boats with missing migrants off the Canary Islands was temporarily suspended on Wednesday due to weather conditions, Spanish rescue workers said.
A “plane took off half an hour ago” to search the area, a spokeswoman for Spain’s Salvamento Maritimo sea rescue service told AFP just after 4pm GMT. “We have no further information at this time,” she added.
Due to “adverse weather conditions,” this plane was unable to take off Wednesday morning.
Since the area off the Spanish archipelago was vast, rescuers conducted the search by air in cooperation with the merchant ships cruising around.
According to the NGO Caminando Fronteras, which gets its information from calls from migrants or their families, three boats that left Senegal and had a total of more than 300 migrants on board are still missing. According to the NGO, one of them left Kafountine on June 27 with around 200 people on board
On Monday, Spanish rescue workers rescued a floating boat with 78 migrants off the Canary Islands. However, according to the NGO, this boat was not one of those three boats.
AFP
A statement released by Senegalese Foreign Ministry on Tuesday sparked confusion over the fate of the three boats. In Dakar it was said that reports of “the disappearance of at least 300 Senegalese at sea, candidates for emigration” and on the way to the Canary Islands were “unfounded”.
The ministry added that between June 28 and July 9, 260 “distressed” Senegalese “were rescued in Moroccan territorial waters” without specifying whether their boats matched those reported by the NGO. When asked by AFP, the Moroccan authorities refused to confirm.
Caminando Fronteras responded in a statement on Wednesday, claiming he was able to show that the rescue operations mentioned by the Senegalese government corresponded to other boats “which also left the Senegalese coast, but not those carrying the 300 wanted people on board”.
On Monday, the mayor of Kafountine confirmed to AFP the departure of migrants, of whom he had no news. He said among them were Senegalese, but also “Gambians, Guineans, Sierra Leoneans…”.