Clandestine immigration makes new victims. Three people were killed while 45 others were rescued off the Canary Islands.
Indeed, the Spanish rescue services found three dead migrants and 45 survivors, some very weakened, on Monday on board a boat off Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands, the coast guard said. Salvamento Maritimo lifeguards rescued the troubled boat off the island of Fuerteventura just after midnight, a spokesman said. He said the crew found 45 survivors on board, including 42 men, two women and a child alongside three dead bodies.
“All the people rescued were Moroccan, with the exception of a man from sub-Saharan Africa,” he told AFP. “Six people have been hospitalized, five of them in serious condition,” he said on Twitter. Since the beginning of the year, 9,589 migrants have made the extremely dangerous sea journey between the African coasts and the Spanish Atlantic islands, against 7,531 a year earlier, according to figures from the Ministry of the Interior.
Migrant arrivals to the Atlantic archipelago have risen sharply since late 2019 after increased patrols dramatically reduced crossings of the Mediterranean. At its shortest, the route from the Moroccan coast is around one hundred kilometers but migrants often come from much further afield, the distance from Mauritania being over a thousand kilometers as the crow flies.
