Taroudante - Spain's Coast Guard said on Friday that it has called off the search for 35 missing migrants after having rescued 15 migrants whose boat was shipwrecked off the coast of Morocco on Thursday, according to AFP.The same source said that the Spanish Coast Guard vessel rescued two women and 13 men who were clinging to the remains of their boat, which sunk some 39 nautical miles northwest of the town of al Hoceima in northern Morocco.
Taroudante – Spain’s Coast Guard said on Friday that it has called off the search for 35 missing migrants after having rescued 15 migrants whose boat was shipwrecked off the coast of Morocco on Thursday, according to AFP.
The same source said that the Spanish Coast Guard vessel rescued two women and 13 men who were clinging to the remains of their boat, which sunk some 39 nautical miles northwest of the town of al Hoceima in northern Morocco.
“The search has ended and it will not be resumed,” a coast guard spokeswoman was quoted by AFP as saying.
“One of the rescued women said the boat had lost its floor at around two in the morning, and many people who were travelling in it were lost,” the statement said.
Helena Maleno of Caminando Fronteras, the NGO that first sounded the alarm, said that most of the migrants on the boat – about 54 in total – were from the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Mali, Guinea, and Cameroon.
The activist criticized the way Spanish authorities treated the migrants who were “presented before a judge on Friday and deported from Spain without taking into account that “they just had a huge shock.”
“They are people who have been displaced due to tragedy and conflict. They are not met with the respect of international conventions,” said Maleno.
“If they had been French victims of a bus accident in Spain, they would not be treated like this.”
Thousands of migrants have died in Mediterranean Sea in attempts to reach Europe.
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