- Migrant boat capsizes off Canary Islands.
- Sole survivor airlifted to hospital.
- Over 50 people feared dead.
According to Spain’s Maritime Rescue Service, over 50 people are feared dead after an inflatable boat from Africa capsized in the Atlantic Ocean about 135 miles off Spanish Canary Islands.
A 30-year-old woman was the sole survivor saved on Thursday from the sinking dinghy, which had left Africa a week earlier carrying 53 migrants and refugees.
A merchant ship had earlier spotted the vessel south of the Kanari and alerted Spanish emergency services.
The woman was clinging to the sinking craft with a dead man and a dead woman next to her, a rescue service official said.
She told rescuers that the inflatable boat had embarked from the Western Sahara coast and that the passengers were from Ivory Coast.
The woman had been airlifted to hospital in Las Palmas, on the island of Gran Canaria.
Migrant and refugee deaths are common in an area of the Atlantic that separates the West Coast of Africa and Spain’s Canary Islands but shipwrecks on the route are hard to verify, and most victims’ bodies are never recovered.
At least 250 people died on the route to the Spanish archipelago in the first six months of 2021, according to the United Nations’ migration agency.
ŠTA UZIMATI IZ OVOG ČLANKA:
- Migrant and refugee deaths are common in an area of the Atlantic that separates the West Coast of Africa and Spain's Canary Islands but shipwrecks on the route are hard to verify, and most victims' bodies are never recovered.
- The woman was clinging to the sinking craft with a dead man and a dead woman next to her, a rescue service official said.
- At least 250 people died on the route to the Spanish archipelago in the first six months of 2021, according to the United Nations' migration agency.
