3 yıl önce

Sole survivor rescued from sinking dinghy off Spain, dozens feared dead

A woman was found clinging to the boat with a dead man and woman next to her, rescuers say after the accident that is feared to have killed 52 African migrants.

Reuters

Migrants wait to disembark from a Spanish coast guard vessel in the port of Arguineguin, on the island of Gran Canaria, Spain on August 19, 2021.

A woman who was the only person pulled from a sinking dinghy in the Atlantic Ocean told her rescuers that the boat had left Africa a week earlier carrying 53 migrants.

Spain's Maritime Rescue Service said on Friday that the woman was clinging to the sinking craft with a dead man and a dead woman next to her.

A merchant ship spotted the inflatable dinghy on Thursday, 255 kilometres south of Spain's Canary Islands, and alerted Spanish emergency services, an official said.

Passengers from Ivory Coast

She told rescuers that the boat had embarked from the Western Sahara coast and that the passengers were from Ivory Coast.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in accordance with departmental rules, had no information about the woman’s health or her age.

Migrants and refugees risk their lives trying to reach European soil by land and sea, and deaths are not uncommon in the area of the Atlantic that separates the west coast of Africa and Spain's Canary Islands.

Shipwrecks on the route are hard to verify, and most victims' bodies are never recovered.

The UN's International Organization for Migration reported that at least 250 migrants died on the route to the Canary Islands in the first six months of 2021.

Migrant rights group Walking Borders counted almost 2,000 deaths in the same period.