The dead are piling up off the coast of West Africa.
At least four migrants died on Tuesday when a boat occupied by around 30 people capsized in front of the Spanish island of Lanzarote, the Canary Islands emergency services reported.
"A makeshift boat capsized at around 7:30 p.m. local time (same time GMT) as it approached the coast, five of its occupants were able to reach land and the emergency services rescued fifteen others," he told the 'AFP a spokesperson for the emergency services.
"The bodies of two deceased people have been found, the search for other occupants of the boat continues," said the spokesperson at first.
She said the tragedy had occurred on the coast of the fishing village of Orzola, north of Lanzarote, an island in the Canary Islands archipelago, located in the Atlantic Ocean off the Moroccan coast.
Shortly afterwards, Lanzarote's director of emergency and security, Enrique Espinosa, announced that two more people had been found dead and that there were currently 28 survivors.
He estimated that three other deceased migrants remained to be found.
More and more departures
The Canaries have experienced a growing influx of migrants this year, who left Africa aboard precarious boats: more than 18,000 reached this archipelago in 2020, about half of them in the last month.
This situation revives the memory of the migration crisis of 2006, when 30,000 migrants landed on the islands of the archipelago.
The Spanish government of socialist Pedro Sanchez has had temporary camps set up to accommodate up to 7,000 people and has launched a diplomatic offensive in several African countries to try to curb the departure of migrants to the Spanish islands in the Atlantic.
