The bodies of eight migrants, thought to be of North African origin, have been found on beaches in southern Spain since Sunday. One child and three women were among the corpses. The authorities said they could have come from one or several small boats.
On Tuesday, September 22, Spanish authorities confirmed that a total of eight bodies have washed up along the shores of southern Spain since Sunday.
According to the local authorities, the bodies were found along a 20 kilometer stretch of coastline in Almeria, southern Spain, reported the news agency Agence France Presse (AFP).
In a press release, the emergency services for the Andalusia region said that among the eight corpses were three women and one child.
The authorities are still trying to identify the bodies but they suspect that they either set off from Algeria or Morocco to cross the western Mediterranean, a crossing of about 200 kilometers at this point.
Origin Algerian?
The German agency dpa reported that the migrants were thought to be from Algeria and that the child was four years old. Citing local Spanish newspaper Voz de Almeria, dpa said that the authorities were wondering if they had all been on the same boat which could have sunk, or whether they had been forced to jump overboard at some point by people smugglers.
Dpa added that the most popular route to arrive in southern Spain was from the Algerian town of Oran. Last weekend, reported dpa, 367 people reached southern Spain safely traveling in 31 different boats.
Arrivals in Spain
Between the beginning of 2021 and September 14, more than 10,000 migrants have arrived in Spain and the Balearic islands. A slight increase on the same period in 2020, confirms the Spanish Interior Ministry to AFP. In this same time period, at least 238 migrants have died trying to cross this western stretch of the Mediterranean.
Slightly more migrants, a little over 11,000 have reached the Spanish archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean, the Canary Islands from the west coast of Africa since the beginning of the years. These numbers are more than double those who arrived on the Canaries in the same period last year.
With dpa and AFP