Royal Navy coastguards in the South Atlantic assisted, on Wednesday, 177 irregular migrants from Sub-Saharan countries, including 52 women and 20 children, who were on board makeshift inflatable boats.
A military source told MAP that the rescued migrants were in serious health conditions. They received necessary first aid aboard the units of the Royal Navy before being brought back to the ports of Boujdour and Dakhla and handed over to the Royal Gendarmerie for customary legal proceedings.
In the last few weeks, police upscaled their crackdown on migrants in Tarfaya, a small fishing town south of Morocco, making over 300 arrests this week in a bid to stop migration flows in the deadly Atlantic.
Since it picked up pace in 2020, the Atlantic route drew in more people who are leaving from West Africa and Morocco’s Atlantic coast for the Canary Islands than it did in the last 13 years.
4,016 migrants, from 21 different nationalities either died or have gone missing, according to a recent report by Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras.
94.80% of those victims have disappeared without having their bodies found, according to the report.
Last year, a total of 83 boats were wrecked. A total of 628 women and 205 children died in these attempts, added the NGO.
“A tragedy of international dimensions,” exacerbated by Spanish migration policy and Spanish-Moroccan political tension, said Caminando Fronteras in a series of tweets.
“Migration control policies have exponentially increased mortality at our borders,” the NGO stated, adding further that, “the Spanish-Moroccan crisis has further increased the deficiencies of the rescue protocols,” causing the lives of entire families to be put in danger.
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