No fewer than 14 people have been confirmed dead after their wooden boat capsized off the Senegalese capital Dakar, a district deputy mayor told newsmen on Tuesday.
‘It seems to be migrants,’ Samba Kandji said after several similar tragedies in recent weeks.
Rescue workers were still looking for more bodies after the pirogue overturned overnight from Sunday to Monday.
‘The navy told the vessel to draw alongside and they fled,” Kandji later added.
‘I was told 14 (dead) but two more bodies have been found. We assume it’s 16,’ he said.
Activity has increased in recent weeks along the Atlantic sea route from northwest Africa used by migrants to try to reach Europe via Spain’s Canary Islands.
Africa Today News, New York reports that no fewer than 14 people died in mid-July when a pirogue capsized off Senegal’s Saint-Louis, near the border with Mauritania.
Morocco’s navy said it had ‘rescued’ nearly 900 irregular migrants in a one-week period this month. Most were from sub-Saharan Africa.
NGOs regularly report fatal shipwrecks in Moroccan, Spanish and international waters, with unofficial estimates putting the death toll in the dozens if not hundreds.
In another report, no fewer than 40 people have gone missing after a migrant boat capsized off the Italian island of Lampedusa, the UN revealed last Friday night.
According to Chiara Cardoletti, a UNHCR spokeswoman in Italy, the shipwreck occurred on Thursday, and at least one newborn baby is among those missing.
46 migrants from Cameroon, Burkina Faso, and the Ivory Coast were aboard the ship when it departed Sfax, Tunisia, according to Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesman for the UN migration organization IOM.
The boat capsized in strong winds and high waves, he said. ‘Some survivors were taken to Lampedusa and others were brought back to Tunisia’.