More than 80 people, including a baby, are feared dead on a migrant boat found off the coast of the Spanish island of Gran Canaria.
The overcrowded boat is said to have left Gambia 27 days ago with 128 people on board.
Only 45 survivors and five bodies remained on board when the Spanish coastguard responded last night following an alert.
The ship was 120 kilometers south of Gran Canaria after the alarm was raised around 7:40 p.m.
The rescue operation in rough seas started shortly after midnight today.
Three of the survivors had to be airlifted to two hospitals in Gran Canaria.
The rest were taken to the port of Arguineguin in the south-east of the holiday island, arriving around 5.20am this morning.
Helena Maleno Garzon, a Spanish-Moroccan journalist and researcher who is a member of the ONG Caminando Fronteras, said 83 people, including three women and a baby, had lost their lives in the tragedy.
Migrants wait for help from the Red Cross after disembarking from a Spanish coast guard ship at the port of Arguineguin, on the island of Gran Canaria, Spain, September 3, 2026
Rescue workers help a migrant disembark from a Spanish coast guard ship in the port of Arguineguin
She said of
‘The survivors have been taken to Gran Canaria. May their souls rest in peace.”
Spain’s Canary Islands have long been a springboard for migrants trying to reach Europe from West Africa and Morocco.
Some experts consider the Atlantic route they take to get here more deadly than the better-known Central Mediterranean smuggling route from Libya and Tunisia to Italy.
Migrant arrivals in the Canary Islands peaked at almost 47,000 in 2024.
The International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project has recorded about 6,600 deaths on the Atlantic route from West Africa since records began in 2014.
But it admits the estimate is a huge undercount due to the lack of information about the route and the phenomenon of ‘invisible shipwrecks’.
Since 2020, Spanish migrant rights group Walking Borders estimates that more than 25,000 have been killed or missing trying to reach the Canary Islands.
This is a breaking news story, more to come.
