More than 80 people are feared to have died on a migrant boat discovered drifting off the Spanish island of Gran Canaria. The overcrowded vessel, believed to have departed from Gambia 27 days ago with 128 individuals on board, was located approximately 75 miles south of the island.
Spanish coastguards responded to an alert on Friday evening and found only 45 survivors and five bodies on the boat. The rescue operation commenced shortly after midnight, facing challenging sea conditions. Three survivors required airlift to Gran Canaria hospitals, while the remaining individuals were taken to Arguineguin Port, arriving early Saturday morning.
Helena Maleno Garzon, a journalist and researcher with the NGO Caminando Fronteras, reported that 83 people, including three women and a baby, had perished. She stated on X, formerly Twitter, that the survivors had been transported to Gran Canaria.
The Canary Islands have long served as a common route for migrants seeking to reach Europe from West Africa and Morocco. Experts suggest this Atlantic route is more perilous than the central Mediterranean route from Libya and Tunisia to Italy. Migrant arrivals in the Canary Islands reached a peak in 2024, with nearly 47,000 recorded.
The International Organization for Migration's Missing Migrants Project has documented approximately 6,600 deaths on the Atlantic route from West Africa since 2014, acknowledging that this figure is likely an undercount due to the route's obscurity and the phenomenon of unrecorded shipwrecks. Since 2020, the Spanish migrants' rights group Walking Borders estimates that over 25,000 people have died or gone missing while attempting to reach the Canary Islands.