Search resumes for 48 missing migrants off Spanish Canaries

By AFP
September 30, 2024
A Spanish Salvamento Maritimo (Sea Search and Rescue agency) vessel tows a boat after 3 “cayuco” boats with around 180 persons onboard arrived at La Restinga port on the Canary island of El Hierro, early on September 19, 2024. — AFP
A Spanish Salvamento Maritimo (Sea Search and Rescue agency) vessel tows a boat after 3 “cayuco” boats with around 180 persons onboard arrived at La Restinga port on the Canary island of El Hierro, early on September 19, 2024. — AFP

PUERTO DE LA ESTACA, Spain: Rescue teams on Sunday resumed searching for at least 48 migrants who went messing the day before when their boat overturned just as it was being rescued off Spain´s Canary Islands, killing at least nine people.

Hopes of finding survivors were slim as sea rescue teams searched the waters off El Hierro, an island in the Atlantic archipelago.

It is the latest in a series of such disasters off the coast of Africa.

“The search operation is resuming,” Spain´s maritime rescue organisation told AFP.

The 48 are “presumed dead”, Canaries regional president Fernando Clavijo told journalists on Saturday night.

More bodies will likely appear “over the next two, three days”, washed up by the current, he added.

Twenty-seven migrants were rescued and nine bodies recovered after the boat, which had set out from Nouadhibou in Mauritania, some 800 kilometres (nearly 500 miles) away, overturned off El Hierro.