MADRID: Sixteen migrants remained missing at sea a day after Spain’s coast guard rescued a boat off the Canary Islands carrying around 40 survivors and a dead body, a government spokesman said Thursday.
“According to testimony from the 40 migrants who were rescued... another 16 people fell into the water off Fuerteventura,” the spokeswoman told AFP, referring to one of the islands on the Atlantic archipelago.
Sources in Salvamento Maritimo, Spain’s coast guard, also confirmed that 16 people were said to have gone missing from the boat they rescued, which was carrying 41 survivors and the body of a person who had died.
The rescue took place some 35 kilometers south of Fuerteventura, which is the closest island to the African coastline from which many boats set sail in a bid to reach European soil.
According to Caminando Fronteras, a Spanish NGO that helps migrant boats in distress, a total of 4,404 migrants died or disappeared while trying to reach Spain last year, up from 2,170 in 2020.
It was the highest yearly number since the group began keeping records in 2015. Many of the bodies are never found.
According to figures compiled by the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project, at least 1,176 people died or went missing in 2021 on the Canary Islands route, while at least 384 others were lost in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Spain from Morocco and Algeria.
Last year, 40,100 migrants managed to reach Spain by sea, interior ministry figures show, a figure almost identical to the number that arrived a year earlier.
16 migrants missing after boat saved off Canary Islands
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16 migrants missing after boat saved off Canary Islands
- “According to testimony from the 40 migrants who were rescued... another 16 people fell into the water off Fuerteventura,” the spokeswoman told AFP
- The rescue took place some 35 kilometres south of Fuerteventura
Blair pressured UK officials over case against soldiers implicated in death of Iraqi
- Newly released files suggest ex-PM took steps to ensure cases were not heard in civilian court
- Baha Mousa died in British custody in 2003 after numerous assaults by soldiers over 36 hours
LONDON: Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair pressured officials not to let British soldiers be tried in civil courts on charges related to the death of an Iraqi man in 2003, The Guardian reported on Tuesday.
Baha Mousa died in British Army custody in Basra during the Iraq War, having been repeatedly assaulted by soldiers over a 36-hour period.
Newly released files show that in 2005 Antony Phillipson, Blair’s private secretary for foreign affairs, had written to the prime minister saying the soldiers involved would be court-martialed, but “if the (attorney general) felt that the case were better dealt with in a civil court he could direct accordingly.”
The memo sent to Blair was included in a series of files released to the National Archives in London this week. At the top of the memo, he wrote: “It must not (happen)!”
In other released files, Phillipson told Blair that the attorney general and Ministry of Defence could give details on changes to the law they were proposing at the time so as to avoid claims that British soldiers could not operate in a war zone for fear of prosecution.
In response, Blair said: “We have, in effect, to be in a position where (the) ICC (International Criminal Court) is not involved and neither is CPS (Crown Prosecution Service). That is essential. This has been woefully handled by the MoD.”
In 2005, Cpl Donald Payne was court-martialed, jailed for a year and dismissed from the army for his role in mistreating prisoners in custody, one of whom had been Mousa.
Payne repeatedly assaulted, restrained and hooded detainees, including as part of what he called “the choir,” a process by which he would kick and punch prisoners at intervals so that they made noise he called “music.”
He became the first British soldier convicted of war crimes, admitting to inhumanely treating civilians in violation of the 2001 International Criminal Court Act.
