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By Sarah Goodman
Rabat – This weekend, a combination of Spanish professionals and civilians rescued 70 people at sea, adrift in the stretch of the Mediterranean between Morocco and Spain.
Saturday afternoon, a local NGO alerted Salvamento Marítimo, a Spain-based search-and-rescue operation, that a rubber dinghy had set sail from Bouyafar, a douar in the Moroccan province of Nador. However, it was a local fisherman who located the dinghy shipwrecked off the coast of the Spanish island of Alborán.
— SALVAMENTO MARÍTIMO (@salvamentogob) January 20, 2018
Salvamento Marítimo reported via Twitter that, of the 37 migrants embarked aboard the dinghy, one had drowned and four others were airlifted to hospitals on the mainland city of Almería.
The second dinghy was located 38 miles south of Almería by another Salvamento Marítimo vessel. 34 people were brought to safety, arriving at the port of Almería late Saturday night.
These incidents are far from isolated: just last week, 150 migrants, in similarly precarious boats and in equally inclement weather, were rescued by the Spanish coast guard.
Salvamento Marítimo announced Monday that their operations had rescued 18,937 migrants crossing the Mediterranean in 2017, marking a 182 percent increase since 2016.
