According to the charity Walking Borders, three ships transporting at least 300 migrants from Senegal have all vanished.
Spanish officials are looking for a boat that has been missing for nearly two weeks and is believed to be transporting at least 200 African migrants, including children.
According to reports, the ship left Kafountine, a hamlet in Senegal’s Cassamance area, in late June and traveled over 1,700 kilometers to Spain’s Canary Islands.
A human rights advocate with the migrant relief group Walking Borders, Helena Maleno, told Reuters on Sunday that two smaller boats, one with approximately 65 people on board and the other with 60, have also been missing since they departed Senegal 15 days ago in an attempt to reach Spain.
They are thought to have departed the country of West Africa on June 23, four days before the bigger ship.
The boat carrying 200 people had only gotten one official alarm, according to the Spanish rescue service, but its plane was still keeping an eye out for any other boats that might be in trouble.
It said on Monday that one of its aircraft had observed a ship carrying hundreds of migrants, raising the possibility that this was the ship that had been reported missing.
71 miles south of Gran Canaria, the plane discovered a huge boat with about 200 passengers on board, according to a service representative quoted by Reuters.
According to a recent assessment by the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), 43 shipwrecks on the West African Atlantic route to Spain’s Canary Islands resulted in at least 559 maritime deaths in 2022. The IOM noted that 74 shipwrecks resulted in 1,126 migrant deaths in 2021.
The UN reported that up to 500 people may still be missing when an overloaded Egyptian trawler sank off the coast of Greece last month, although only 78 deaths have been officially confirmed.
