As many as 50 people are thought to have died after a boat bound for the Canary Islands got into difficulties after a 13-day voyage along the perilous Atlantic migration route from west Africa.
The migration NGO Caminando Fronteras (Walking Borders) said the boat set off from Mauritania on 2 January carrying 86 people. It said it alerted the Moroccan and Spanish authorities after receiving reports that the boat was trouble, and that Moroccan rescuers had managed to save 36 people. But 50 of those onboard, most of them from Pakistan, are feared drowned.
“Fifty people have died on a boat headed for the Canary Islands, 44 of whom were Pakistani,” the charity’s CEO, Helena Maleno, wrote on X. “They spent 13 agonising days at sea without rescuers reaching them.”
The regional president of the Canary Islands offered his condolences and renewed his calls for action as the Spanish archipelago continues to receive record numbers of migrants and refugees who arrive by sea.
“We can’t just be witnesses to all this,” Fernando Clavijo wrote on X. “The state and Europe need to act. The Atlantic can’t carry on being the graveyard of Africa. We can’t keep turning our back on the humanitarian drama.”
Spain’s maritime rescue service, Salvamento Marítimo, said it had no information on the incident, but added that it had conducted an aerial search after receiving an alert on 10 January about a boat that had set out from Nouakchott in Mauritania.
“We cannot say whether that was the same shipwreck,” a spokesperson said.
Last year, 46,843 people reached the Canaries on the increasingly perilous Atlantic route, up from 39,910 in 2023.
According to a recent report from Caminando Fronteras, at least 10,457 people died or disappeared while trying to reach Spain by sea from 1 January to 5 December 2024.
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The NGO said the death toll was a 50% increase on 2023 and the highest since its tallies began in 2007. It attributed the rise to the use of ramshackle boats, dangerous waters and a lack of resources for rescuers.
Frontex, the EU border and coastguard agency, said while irregular crossings on the central Mediterranean route dropped by 59% last year because of a decrease in departures from Tunisia and Libya, crossings to the Canaries rose by 18%. It said the rise was “fuelled by departures from Mauritania, even as flows from other departure points declined”.
