More Than 80 Feared Dead on Migrant Boat Adrift 27 Days in Atlantic
Spanish rescuers reached a boat 65 nautical miles off Gran Canaria carrying 44 survivors — men and boys from Mali and Senegal — and five bodies that heavy seas made impossible to recover. The vessel left The Gambia in early August with around 127 aboard; the NGO Caminando Fronteras says 83 died, including a baby girl. “It is intolerable that lives continue to be lost,” said the Canaries’ president. “The Atlantic continues to be a death trap.”
Twenty-seven days adrift is starvation and thirst doing slowly what the sea usually does quickly, and the arithmetic of this single hull — perhaps 83 dead against 44 alive — would make it one of the Atlantic route’s worst disasters even in a year when arrivals have fallen by more than half. That fall is the bitter context: fewer crossings have not meant proportionately fewer deaths, because the deterrent pressure that thins the traffic also pushes it into smaller boats, longer routes and worse weather windows. The five bodies left aboard for the waves, unrecoverable in 2.5-metre swells, will stand for the dozens never counted at all — Caminando Fronteras’ figures exist precisely because official ones cannot. Watch the survivors’ testimony; prosecutions of the route’s organisers depend on it.