Sharjah24 – AFP: Rescuers said they found four bodies on a migrant boat off the Canary Islands Sunday, just hours after a lone survivor had been pulled to safety, with an NGO saying it had set sail with 34 people aboard.
Spain's Salvamento Maritimo coastguard said on Twitter that it had "recovered the bodies of four people" from a boat some 150 nautical miles southwest of Gran Canaria island, with the lone survivor rescued on Saturday night by a passing merchant ship and then evacuated by helicopter.
Helena Maleno, head of Caminando Fronteras, a Spanish NGO that helps migrant boats in trouble at sea and families searching for loved ones, said on Twitter they had received a distress call from the same vessel a week earlier after it set sail from Western Sahara.
At the time there were 34 people on board.
"On Saturday 24 September we received an alert about a boat which had left the coast just south of Laayoun at dawn that morning," she tweeted, saying they had alerted rescuers.
After a week with no news, a boat was spotted south of the Canary Islands carrying "an exhausted 26-year-old man and four bodies.. By the end of the night, we knew it was the same boat that had gone missing with 34 people on board," she said.
Since the start of the year, a total of 11,522 migrants have managed to cross the notoriously dangerous Atlantic route to Spain's Canary Islands, a figure slightly higher than the same period last year, interior ministry figures to September 15 show.
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