Four people have been found dead in a makeshift boat carrying some 23 migrants near Spain's Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa, local authorities said. Nineteen of them were hospitalized on Tenerife.
The French authorities discovered a migrant boat on the beach at Quend in Normandy on Sunday. The beach is almost 90 kilometers further south than the normal crossings from Calais and Boulogne towards the UK.
On April 3, Alarm Phone reported the presence of three boats in the Maltese Search and Rescue regions. The people on two of the boats were rescued and taken to Lampedusa. An estimated 110 people on the third boat appear to still be unaccounted for, what has happened?
Tensions are rising on the Canary Islands where migrants feel trapped – they are officially in Europe but unable to get to the mainland. Many of them are leaving the camps, saying they are inadequate.
A total of 183 migrants on board six small boats crossed the English Channel from France to UK on Tuesday, March 23. That is the highest number in one day so far this year.
Up to 60 migrants are feared dead after a shipwreck on Thursday, March 18. The organization Alarm Phone has tried to reconstruct what happened and has spoken with survivors. Its report was released on Monday.
The private rescue ship Ocean Viking is carrying 116 rescued migrants on board in the central Mediterranean following two separate rescues. The crew say they have sent requests for docking and are waiting for a place of safety in order to disembark the migrants soon, as storms approach.
A 25-year-old Afghan man, father to a five-year-old child who died in November in an attempt to reach the Greek island of Samos from Turkey by boat, has spoken out about being charged with endangering his son's life by the Greek authorities and why he is bringing a counter-case against the Greek coast guard.
It was a busy weekend in the central Mediterranean. The Spanish rescue organization Open Arms said that it had picked up 146 migrants in two separate rescue operations. Meanwhile, the Tunisian navy said that it had picked up 25 from a shipwreck, with one person confirmed dead and about 22 missing.
36 migrants on two separate boats were found in difficulty in the Channel between France and Britain at the weekend. They were taken back to France by a coastguard patrol boat who declared the migrants "safe and sound."
Migrants and crew onboard the Ocean Viking celebrated on Sunday after they were told the ship's 422 passengers could disembark in the port of Augusta in Sicily. Disembarkation was expected to start on Monday.
The humanitarian organization SOS Mediterranee said on Thursday that its crew had rescued 121 people, among them 19 women and two small children, from an overcrowded rubber boat off Libya. Another 140 migrants were returned to Libya by coast guards on Wednesday.