Another tragedy at sea: 42 dead and 8 babies hospitalized heading to the Canaries

The founder of Caminando Fronteras, Helena Maleno, has informed of another tragedy at sea whilst aiming to head to the Canary Islands, with the sinking of a boat off the coast of Dakhla (Western Sahara) in which 42 people have died. This is the second warning from the charity organisation this week, after the sinking of a boat on Wednesday with 75 people on board off the coast of Laayoune, which caused the death of at least three people on board.

This coincides with the discovery of a boat with 63 irregular immigrants on board, spotted by a pleasure boat when it was only 15 kilometres from the coast of Gran Canaria and intercepted in the early afternoon by maritime rescue who took them to the port of Arguineguín.

Onboard were 8 babies, another 4 children, 33 women and 18 men. The health services transferred all the babies to the Maternal and Child Hospital in Las Palmas; one of them in serious condition with severe dehydration.

Up until the end of April this year, the so-called ‘Canarian route’ from west Africa to the islands, has claimed the lives of 88 people killed in boats. On average, one person dies every 32 hours trying to make the trip, according to the records of the two United Nations agencies that work in this area: UNHCR and IOM.

From the count carried out by the Missing Migrants program of the International Organization for Migration, since the beginning of 2021, 87 people had lost their lives trying to reach the Canary Islands in boats, of which only 47 bodies were recovered.

The 24 bodies that were recovered from the cayuco found adrift on April 26th almost 500 kilometres from El Hierro, is the biggest number of dead in the Canary Islands with this type of vessel since February 14th 2009, when a shipwreck killed 25 people off the coast of Lanzarote.

As it is a clandestine phenomenon, without passenger lists, the casualty figures are imprecise and many episodes that occur in the middle of the ocean are not even reported. This makes it difficult to know exactly how many have actually happened since two Sahrawis inaugurated the route on August 28th 1994, when they arrived in Fuerteventura by boat.

The first fatal accident, of which there is evidence, occurred five years later on that same island, with nine deaths on July 26th 1999. On February 14th 2009 on the coast of Los Cocoteros, in Lanzarote, 25 young Maghrebi (17 of which were minors) drowned when their boat capsized near the shore.

The arrival of irregular immigrants to Spain so far in 2021 has reached 16,586 people from January 1st to August 1^st, with 7,531 of them going to the Canary Islands, 48.4% more than in the same period of 2020 when there were 11,177. This means an increase of about 2,000 people in the last fortnight of July, because as of the 15th of last month, 14,737 had entered.