2023-07-12 06:52:16
“Every minute counts to find alive the more than 300 people on board Senegalese canoes (…). We need more research resources and better collaboration between Mauritania, Spain and Morocco”, insisted Tuesday 11 July on Twitter the founder of Caminando Fronteras, Helena Maleno.
Three migrant boats, declared missing by the NGO off the Canary Islands, still cannot be found, as Spanish rescuers did not locate any boats in the area on Tuesday.
The Spanish sea rescue service, which had assisted migrants adrift off the Canary Islands on Monday, asked for help from boats sailing in the area and sent one of its planes to fly over this part of the Atlantic Ocean, a spokeswoman told AFP.
“The plane searched the area and found nothing,” she added, without being able to indicate whether the search would continue on Wednesday.
78 migrants rescued on Monday
Monday, Spanish rescuers had rescued a boat carrying 78 migrants in the same area – and not 86 as they had initially indicated – who were taken care of by the Red Cross on the island of Gran Canaria.
But according to the NGO Caminando Fronteras, which gets its information from calls from migrants or their relatives, three other boats, which left Senegal and transported a total of more than 300 migrants, are still missing.
One of these three boats left on June 27 from Kafountine, a small coastal town in southern Senegal, located regarding 1,700 kilometers from the Canary Islands, with regarding 200 people on board.
The Spanish rescuers had initially indicated that the boat rescued on Monday seemed to carry this number of people and therefore correspond to this boat before acknowledging their error.
The boat rescued on Monday is not one of the three boats that left Senegal still being sought, a spokesman for Caminando Fronteras told AFP on Tuesday.
“Unsubstantiated information”
In a press release on Tuesday, the Senegalese Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote that it had “learned with astonishment of the publication, on social networks, of information reporting the disappearance at sea of at least 300 Senegalese, candidates for emigration, including the boats coming from Kafountine were heading for the Canary Islands”.
“It appears from the verifications that have been made that this information is completely unfounded,” said the ministry.
However, on Monday, the mayor of Kafountine had confirmed to AFP the departure of migrants, of whom he had no news. He said that there were among them Senegalese but also “Gambians, Guineans, Sierra Leoneans…”
See alsoSenegal: the tragedy of illegal emigration to the Canary Islands
Senegal, and more particularly the south of the country, is one of the departure points towards Europe for illegal migrants.
On Tuesday, one of the main Senegalese opponents, Ousmane Sonko, attributed on Twitter this “macabre and distressing phenomenon” of the departure of illegal migrants to “the failure of the public policies of President Macky Sall’s regime”.
With AFP
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