Five migrants were found dead on Wednesday June 19 aboard a boat off the coast of the Canary Islands, while at least sixty-eight other people were rescued, the Spanish emergency services announced Thursday June 20.
The canoe was spotted in the afternoon when it was about 800 kilometers south of Tenerife, one of the islands of this Spanish archipelago located near the northwest coast of the African continent, where the number of Migrant arrivals have been increasing again in recent weeks.
The migration route through the Canaries has been very busy in recent years due to the tightening of controls in the Mediterranean Sea. Shipwrecks are frequent during these long and dangerous crossings aboard small boats coming from Morocco or Western Sahara, about a hundred kilometers away, but also, further south, from Mauritania, Senegal and even the Gambia, about a thousand kilometers away.
During the first two weeks of October 2023, 8,561 migrants arrived, a record number according to Spanish media since a previous migration crisis in 2006. This “resurgence” arrivals is linked to “destabilization in the Sahel”said the Spanish Interior Minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska during a visit to the Canaries this week.