The wreck was confirmed by a security source in mauritania, which has clarified that it had taken place in international waters.
forty-two migrants have drowned and one survived in a shipwreck off the coast of Mauritania, a-t we learned Thursday with the united Nations Agency for refugees (UNHCR) and a security source in mauritania.
“New shipwreck off the coast of Nouadhibou, with approximately 40 persons on board, there is a survivor (of Guinea)”, has stated on Twitter Vincent Cochetel, head of the UN agency. The UNHCR and the international Organization for migration (IOM), with the local authorities and their partners, “trying to strengthen the efforts to prevent such tragedies, but the traffickers continue to lie to their clients,” said Vincent Cochelet, special envoy of the agency for the central Mediterranean.
One survivor
The wreck was confirmed by a security source in mauritania, which has clarified that it had taken place in international waters, “far from” the shores of this country of West Africa located between Senegal and the western Sahara. “We have found by chance the sole survivor” on a beach of Nouadhibou (north-west), “says a Guinean,” said this source, speaking under cover of anonymity.
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He said that “he and his friends came to Morocco and made their way to the Canary islands, Spanish archipelago off the coast of Morocco. “Our boat has been a failure. For a long time we have not had relief. It was then the stampede”, the occupants throwing himself into the sea, he said from his hospital bed, according to remarks reported by this source. “They are all dead, I think. I am the only survivor” he added.
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More than sixty african migrants were already dead drowned off Mauritania in December 2019, in the worst wreck of the year last on the migration route along the Atlantic coast. Among the migration routes to get to Europe, the route of West Africa, by sea or by land, was one of the favorite routes, used by tens of thousands of migrants in the mid-2000s. By the sea, a kind of taxi boats pick up the migrants in the ports at the start of the gulf of Guinea.
The Canary islands (Spain), a hundred kilometers of the moroccan coast, gave one of the main gateways to the european Union. The measures taken by Spain, have reduced the flow, to the point that a centre for migration of Nouadhibou has been closed. At the same time, the migrants borrowed in the number of journeys the mediterranean to Spain, Greece or Italy.
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Europe and the crisis of the migrants
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But the road west is experiencing a relative revival over the past two years, due to the measures taken against the migration transiting through Libya, according to IOM. The migrant leaving West Africa, not only for economic reasons, but also because of a lack of faith in the future, or family pressure.
