Spain’s coastguard said it rescued 86 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa aboard a boat near the Canary Islands that had been spotted earlier on Monday by a rescue plane.
The Salvamento Maritimo coastguard service said they had found the boat with six females and 80 males on board as rescuers were searching for a missing migrant boat that had “left Senegal with around 200 people on board”.
It did not indicate the ages of those rescued.
When a rescue plane spotted the vessel about 71 nautical miles south of the island of Gran Canaria, it was initially thought to have “around 200 people on board”, a spokeswoman said.
“We can’t be 100 per cent sure but it’s likely it is the same boat,” she said.
But the coastguard later acknowledged that the es-timate by the plane’s crew was incorrect. “It is diffi-cult to determine the number of people from the air,” she told AFP.
A rescue ship brought the migrants to the port of Arguineguin on Gran Canaria, where they were greeted by Red Cross workers who provided them with medical care.
The situation remains confusing, however, and the spokeswoman told AFP she was not able to say whether there was another boat adrift in the same area with 200 people on board.
Helena Maleno, head of Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras, which helps migrant boats in distress, said a vessel had left the southern Senegalese town of “Kafountine on June 27 with approximately 200 people on board”.—APP
“There are many minors on board,” she said in an audio message, explaining the families had “told us about the disappearance of the boat, saying they had had no news for several days”.
Kafountine is a fishing village in the southern part of Senegal, which lies at least 1,700 kilometres (more than 1,000 miles) south of the Canary Islands.
She said the NGO knew of two other boats with around 120 people on board that were also missing after leaving Senegal on June 23.
