Photo credit: the Guardian
At least 55 people died trying to reach Spain’s Canary Islands in boats from the coast of Africa over the weekend.
AA reports that the Spanish Coast Guard also rescued 1,786 people, making the voyage on one of the most dangerous routes in the world.
The worst tragedy took place on a wooden ship that had left from the north of Mauritania nearly three weeks before it was found drifting 370 kilometers south of the Spanish island of El Hierro on Saturday.
When the Spanish Coast Guard arrived, only ten people remained onboard. They said the boat initially had 58 passengers, but the rest had died, and they were thrown overboard.
.
On Sunday afternoon, a dinghy sank ninety kilometers off the island of Lanzarote. The Coast Guard recovered five bodies but managed to save seventeen people after launching a raft from a plane.
The same mission rescued 80 migrants with problems in a nearby dinghy.
In another operation, authorities recovered the body of a woman who had fallen from a dinghy that was beginning to deflate. The other fifty-four people on the dinghy were rescued.
Apart from the deaths at sea, another migrant who arrived at El Hierro died in a local hospital Sunday from injuries sustained during her travels.
In total, EFE reported that 815 of the rescued migrants were taken to the island of Lanzarote, 754 to El Hierro, 157 to Fuerteventura, and 160 to Tenerife.
