Scores of Senegalese migrants dead or missing after monthlong voyage for Spain
More than 60 migrants are feared dead after a Spanish fishing vessel off the Atlantic island of Cape Verde rescued a boat that started its journey a month ago with more than 100 aboard, authorities and migrant advocates said Thursday.
Seven dead bodies were found on the boat, while an estimated 56 people are missing at sea and presumed dead, said International Organization for Migration spokesperson Safa Msehli. According to Senegal’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 38 survivors were rescued earlier in the week near Cabo Verde, about 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.
Families in Fass Boye, a seaside town 90 miles north of the capital, Dakar, had reached out to Walking Borders on July 20 after 10 days without hearing from loved ones on the boat, group founder Helena Maleno Garzón said.
Cheikh Awa Boye, president of the local fishermen’s association, said he has two nephews among the missing. “They wanted to go to Spain,” Boye said.
Spain’s Maritime Rescue Service confirmed that a Spanish fishing boat, the Zillarri, rescued 38 people and recovered seven bodies from a Senegalese pirogue Monday after spotting it adrift northeast of Cabo Verde. An executive with the tropical tuna fishing company Pevasa, which operates the Zillarri, said the survivors were asking for help and were in a “bad state.”
Migrants, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, are undertaking perilous sea journeys to Europe in unprecedented numbers, sometimes with tragic results.
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 last year. The boats try to reach Spain’s Canary Islands, an archipelago off the northwest coast of Africa that has been used as a stepping stone 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.
Nearly 10,000 people have reached the Canary Islands by sea from the northwest coast of Africa so far this year, according to Spanish Interior Ministry figures.
On Aug. 7, Morocco’s navy recovered the bodies of five Senegalese migrants and rescued 189 others after their boat capsized off the coast of Western Sahara.
In 2021, an Associated Press investigation found that at least seven migrant boats from northwest Africa got lost in the Atlantic and were found drifting across the Caribbean and even in Brazil, carrying only lifeless bodies.
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