Among the 43 dead migrants – mostly from sub-Saharan Africa – only two bodies could be recovered, said the association, which draws up its assessments on the basis of testimonies from survivors or families of migrants.
Ten people from the boat were rescued, according to the same source. “The ten survivors, including six women, called for help at four o’clock in the morning (Sunday) and maintained the communication until six o’clock (…) It took hours for the (Moroccan) authorities to locate and save the boat off Tarfaya”, detailed a spokesperson for the Spanish NGO.
These migrants were trying to reach the Canary Islands, in Spain, located about a hundred kilometers from Tarfaya. No additional information on this shipwreck has been communicated from an official Moroccan source. Located at the northwestern tip of Africa, Morocco is a transit country for many migrants seeking to reach Europe from its Atlantic or Mediterranean coasts.
The bodies of two men were also discovered, one Sunday and the other Monday, off the Spanish island of Fuerteventura, in the Canary archipelago, told AFP a spokesperson for the Spanish Civil Guard. The autopsy is in progress but “everything indicates that they are migrants” who “must have been on the high seas for a while”, he added.
According to a report in early January from Caminando Fronteras, more than 4,000 migrants died or disappeared last year during their sea crossing to Spain, twice as many as in 2020. The bodies of almost all of of them (94%) were never found and are therefore counted as missing.
In 2021, more than 37,300 migrants, mostly from Morocco, arrived by sea in Spain (in the peninsula as well as in the Balearic and Canary archipelagos), according to the latest figures from the Spanish Ministry of l ‘Interior.