Spain: 14 people found alive off the Balearic Islands – Franceinfo

The Spanish authorities who had initially announced, Monday, October 4, to have found eleven lifeless bodies off the archipelago, corrected their assessment in the evening to announce that 14 people had been found alive and that no dead had been find.

Rescue workers are still probing the waters for the possible search of three people who could have been on board the same “makeshift craft” that migrants take to cross the Mediterranean. Occupants of the boat said that 17 people were on board and that some had thrown themselves into the water, explained the prefecture of the Balearic Islands.

Among those rescued, three were recovered from the water and evacuated by helicopter, nine others were found on board the boat and two others were recovered by the occupants of a pleasure boat who had notified the emergency services.

The number of arrivals of migrants, often from Algeria, on the archipelago or in the south-east of Spain, has jumped in recent months. Nearly 300 of them were thus rescued from Monday to Friday off the Balearic Islands. While controls have been tightened in the Strait of Gibraltar, which separates Spain from Morocco, the migratory route of the “harragas”, the Arab nickname given to illegal migrants leaving from Algeria, has increased according to NGOs and authorities.

The crossing can be over 200 km and is more dangerous this season, the sea being much less favorable than in summer. In mid-September, the bodies of eight migrants who left Algeria or Morocco, including that of a child and three women, were found by the Spanish authorities on beaches in the province of Almeria, in the south-east. of the peninsula.