On Sunday, a migrant boat capsized in the Mediterranean sea off the Canary Islands, just hours after a lone survivor had been pulled to safety. An NGO reported that the boat had set sail with 34 passengers aboard, according to AFP.
Spain’s Salvamento Maritimo coastguard said on Twitter that it had “recovered the bodies of four people” from a boat some 150 nautical miles southwest of Gran Canaria island. The lone survivor was rescued on Saturday night by a passing merchant ship, and evacuated by helicopter.
Helena Maleno, Head of Caminando Fronteras, a Spanish NGO that helps troubled migrant boats at sea tweeted that they had received a distress call from the same vessel a week earlier, after it set sail from Western Sahara.
“On Saturday 24 September we received an alert about a boat which had left the coast just south of Laayoun at dawn that morning,” she tweeted, saying they had alerted rescuers.
After a week with no news, a boat was spotted south of the Canary Islands carrying “an exhausted 26-year-old man and four bodies. By the end of the night, we knew it was the same boat that had gone missing with 34 people on board,” she said.
“A new tragedy on one of the most deadly migrant routes — the Canaries route,” Maleno said, counting “33 more victims.”
“Only four bodies have been found. The rest of the victims, a total of 29, have been swallowed up by the ocean. Their families will suffer grief terribly with no bodies to be able to say goodbye to.”
Notably, Libya has emerged as the dominant transit point for migrants fleeing war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East, hoping for a better life in Europe. The shipwreck is just the latest tragedy at sea.
Human traffickers in recent years have benefited from the chaos in Libya, smuggling in migrants across the oil-rich country’s lengthy borders with six nations. The migrants are then packed into ill-equipped rubber boats, and set off on risky sea voyages.
In September, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said that a total of 9,000 migrants, including 656 women and 342 minors were returned to Libya, after being rescued off the country’s coast in 2022.
The UN agency also added that 156 migrants drowned, and 565 others went missing this year.
In 2021, at least 32,425 migrants were intercepted and returned to Libya. At least 1,553 are presumed to have drowned last year, according to IOM.
Libya has been suffering insecurity and chaos since the fall of the late leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.