More than 300 migrants were rescued by Reuters outside the Spanish Canary Islands
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© Reuters. The migrants are waiting to disembark from a Spanish coastal ship in the port of Arguineguin, Gran Canaria, Spain, on January 26, 2022. REUTERS / Borja Suarez
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By Borja Suarez
ARGUINEGUIN, Spain (Reuters) – Spanish naval rescue services on Wednesday picked up more than 300 migrants trying to get into the Canary Islands by boat, nine of them aboard a sunken ship.
The rescue service said it was not known to drown, a rights group said.
Helena Maleno, founder of the Walking Borders migration monitoring group, said 18 people had been killed in an attempt to make a dangerous crossing from Africa to Lanzarote Island. Reuters could not independently confirm this figure.
The rescue service said on its Twitter (NYSE 🙂 account that 319 migrants had been rescued from six boats, including one carrying about 120 people, and taken to Lanzarote and Gran Canaria.
Eleven people were shown wrapped in red blankets before dawn, arriving at the port of Arguineguin in a rescue boat and accompanied by emergency personnel in disguise in protective clothing.
Ten people, including a pregnant woman and a child, were sent to health centers, but none of them were in danger.
The islands of the West African coast have become the main destination for migrants trying to reach Spain, with a much smaller section trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to the Spanish mainland.
In 2021, a total of 22,316 migrants arrived in the Canary Islands illegally, up from 23,271 the previous year. Last year was one of the busiest crossings of its kind in the last decade, according to data from the Interior Ministry.
Walking Borders said that in 2021 more than 4,400 migrants, including at least 205 children, were lost at sea trying to reach Spain, more than double the number in 2020 and the highest since the group began counting in 2018.
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