Spain finds 11 dead migrants in boat and rescues 33 passengers

Spain’s Maritime Rescue Service on Thursday found 11 dead migrants in a boat off the country’s southern coast and rescued 33 other passengers, one of whom later also died.

All of the migrants were from sub-Saharan Africa, a spokeswoman with the service told the Associated Press. A tweet sent Thursday by the Spanish Red Cross said that two women, one of them pregnant, were among those who died.

Rescuers had been looking for the boat about 11 miles south of the city of Almeria for two days, said the Maritime Rescue Service official, who was not authorized to be named in media reports.

A Spanish navy scientific research vessel found the drifting boat in the area, east of the Strait of Gibraltar, in the early hours of Thursday.

Twenty-nine men and four women were still alive on board, but one of the men later died in a hospital in Almeria.

The service said it’s also looking for three more boats in the so-called Alboran Sea, two of them carrying more than 55 migrants each.

According to the U.N., more than 61,500 migrants, who often flee violence or poverty, have arrived in Spain since the beginning of 2018, nearly 55,000 of them by sea.