Caminando Fronteras, an NGO specializing in migration on the Africa-Canary Islands route, reported a shipwreck with dozens of dead and missing that took place on Tuesday near the coast of Dakhla, in Western Sahara.
According to the NGO, the dead are 42, including 30 women, 8 minors and 4 men. While some fishermen, as the Moroccan news site also reports Dakhlanews.com, rescued 10 people before the Moroccan Navy intervened. Dakhlanews reports that yesterday 12 bodies were found on a beach that could be of migrants who died in this tragedy.
Helena Maleno, a well-known activist in Spain and spokesperson for Caminado Fronteras, explained to theAnsa that his organization has tracked down the survivors: through their testimonies, in particular that of a woman who lost two children, it was possible to reconstruct the dynamics of the shipwreck and to know how many people were missing. The boat would have been overturned by a wave.
The Moroccan and Spanish authorities have not officially confirmed the reported facts at the moment. “This is a conflict zone, many of the shipwrecks that occur there are not reported,” said Maleno. The Spanish maritime rescue service has activated the search for another boat with migrants, which, according to reports received, would have sailed from the same area of Western Sahara on Monday.
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