About 30 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa disappeared in the crossing to the Spanish Canary Islands while more than 30 others were rescued, authorities said Tuesday (August 31).
Read alsoSpain: a dozen missing migrants and three bodies found off the Canary Islands
Spanish rescuers said they had rescued 32 migrants at dawn on Tuesday off the island of Fuerteventura.
A person who died during the crossing was also on board the boat.
But according to the testimonies of the survivors, about 60 people had initially taken place on board the boat, indicated to AFP a source within the prefecture of the Canaries.
Two missing boats according to an NGO
Contacted by AFP, the NGO Caminando Fronteras, which monitors the flow of migrants and receives their calls for help, said for its part that two boats had been reported missing, one carrying 42 people and the other 59. Her spokesperson Siham Korriche underlined the confusion reigning around the boat having been rescued, some survivors citing, according to her, a number of "
12 or 14
" missing. "
These two boats were inflatable boats
" in the zodiac style, "
they left from the same area
", Tan-Tan in the south of Morocco, "
the same day, so we do not know which boat was found
", she added.
Last week, a dozen migrants had disappeared off the Canary Islands and three corpses of women were located a few hours later in the same area, east of the island of Lanzarote.
And on August 19, a migrant was rescued off the archipelago while she was on an overturned zodiac next to two corpses and claimed that she was traveling with about 40 people, probably dead.
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8,222 migrants arrived on the archipelago in 2021
The arrivals of migrants to the Canaries, at the end of a particularly dangerous crossing, have seen a spectacular increase since the end of 2019 and the tightening of controls in the Mediterranean.
In 2020, a record year since 2006, 23,023 migrants reached the Canaries, eight times more than the previous year, according to the Spanish Ministry of the Interior.
The flow of arrivals has not stopped since.
From January 1 to August 15, 8,222 migrants arrived in the archipelago, more than twice as many as over the same period in 2020.
Read alsoSpain: a migrant rescued and around forty probable deaths off the Canary Islands
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), at least 428 people lost their lives during the crossing from January 1 to August 20, 102 more than in the same period last year.
But according to data compiled by Caminando Fronteras based on testimonies from migrants, at least 1,922 people went missing at sea in the first six months of 2021.
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