ARCHIVED - 5-year-old migrant girl dies after 17 days at sea heading for the Canaries
A helicopter rescue failed to save the girl after a merchant vessel picked her and her companions up off the coast of Africa
Efforts to save the life of a 5-year-old migrant girl who was spotted drifting in the Atlantic on board a small boat after 17 days at sea proved fruitless in Gran Canaria on Wednesday, after she was airlifted to land by helicopter.
The helicopter collected the girl, along with a man and woman, from the merchant vessel the Cape Cape Taweelah, which had picked them up from the open sea, and arrived at the Hospital Universitario Doctor Negrín in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria shortly before midnight on Tuesday. Both the woman and the girl had been in very poor health since they were rescued from the sea, and medical staff managed to save only the elder of the two.
Their boat had been spotted between Nuadibú in Mauritania and Dajla in the Western Sahara, two of the coastal locations most often used as starting points for migrants attempting the perilous voyage towards the Canaries and EU territory. Initially it was reported that 35 people had successfully been taken on board the cargo ship and that only a dead man remained on the small boat, and this misinformation, coupled with rough sea conditions, delayed the rescue mission.
Figures compiled by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UN’s ACNUR Commission report that between 136 and 160 people lost their lives while attempting to cross on small boats from north-western Africa to the Canaries in the first six months of this year, equating to an average of almost one death per day.
Image: Salvamento Marítimo