Eighty-nine bodies. That was the count the Mauritanian coast guard reached after a large wooden fishing boat, packed with people hoping to reach Europe, went over in the Atlantic on Monday, July 1.
The state news agency announced the toll on Thursday. In its words, the coast guard “recovered the bodies of 89 people aboard a large traditional fishing boat” that capsized about 4 kilometers from Ndiago, a city in the country’s southwest. A senior local government official, who spoke to AFP without giving a name, described much the same picture.
Nine people were pulled out alive. One of them was a 5-year-old girl.
72 still unaccounted for
Survivors told the agency the boat left from the border between Senegal and Gambia carrying 170 passengers. Set that against the 89 dead and nine rescued, and 72 people have not been found.
A route that keeps getting busier
The Atlantic crossing is the harsher option. Currents are strong, the boats are usually overloaded and often unfit for open water, and passengers may have too little drinking water. Even so, more people have turned to it because patrols in the Mediterranean have tightened.
The Spanish government recorded 39,910 migrant arrivals in the Canary Islands in 2023, a record and more than twice the previous year’s figure. The islands sit 100 kilometers off the North African coast at the nearest point. Most boats start well beyond that. The long wooden vessels known as pirogues set out from Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Gambia and Senegal.
The death rate on this route is hard to ignore. Caminando Fronteras, a Spanish charity, counted more than 5,000 migrants dead in the first five months of this year while trying to reach Spain by sea. That works out to 33 deaths per day, the highest daily figure since the group began compiling numbers in 2007. Most of those deaths were on the Atlantic route.
Sources
- 89 migrants die, dozens missing when boat capsizes off Mauritania
- At least 89 migrants dead after boat capsizes off Mauritania, state news agency says
Sources
- 89 migrants die, dozens missing when boat capsizes off Mauritania
- At least 89 migrants dead after boat capsizes off Mauritania, state…
