Month Long Voyage To Spain
17 Aug 2023
More than 60 Senegalese migrants might be dead
More than 60 migrants are feared dead after a Spanish fishing vessel rescued a boat off the Atlantic archipelago of Cape Verde that originally had more than 100 people aboard, authorities and migrant advocates said Thursday.
Seven bodies were found on the boat and an estimated 56 people are missing at sea and presumed dead, said International Organization for Migration spokesperson Safa Msehli. According to Senegal’s foreign affairs ministry, 38 people were rescued earlier in the week near Cape Verde, about 620 kilometers (385 miles) off the coast of West Africa.
The Spanish migration advocacy group Walking Borders said the vessel was a large fishing boat, called a pirogue, which had left Senegal on July 10.
An official of the tropical tuna fishing company PEVASA, which operates the Zillarri, said the survivors were asking for help and were in a “bad state.”
The route from West Africa to Spain is one of the world’s most dangerous, yet the number of migrants leaving from Senegal on rickety wooden boats has surged over the past year. The boats try to reach Spain’s Canary Islands, an archipelago off the northwest coast of Africa that has been used as a steppingstone to continental Europe.
Nearly 1,000 migrants died while trying to reach Spain by sea in the first six months of 2023, Walking Borders says. Worsening youth unemployment, political unrest, violence by armed groups and climate change push migrants across West Africa to risk their lives on overcrowded boats.