A 14-month-old baby of Gambian nationality who was traveling with his mother and uncle is among the eight people allegedly murdered on the voyage of a boat that arrived in El Hierro on December 28, 2024 with 224 occupants on board, including 14 children and 57 women.
Among the deceased are also a father and his son, 50 and 18 years old and of Guinean nationality, as reported this Wednesday by the Civil Guard in a statement, which specifies that seven alleged skippers of the boat, located in Tenerife, Madrid, León and Almería, have been arrested for these events.
The Civil Guard has fully identified five of the eight fatalities and continues to work to put a name to the rest of the people who lost their lives on a boat that had departed seven days earlier from the Senegalese island of Bassar.
The direct relatives of four of the fatalities have already filed a complaint about the events, the note adds.
Upon arrival on the Canary Islands coasts, the migrants had to be immediately attended to by health personnel as they presented serious injuries, presumably caused in some altercation that occurred during the voyage, details the Civil Guard.
The agents investigated the incident to clarify the origin of the injuries and, after collecting testimonies from several of the occupants of the boat, discovered that together with those 224 people another eight should have arrived who allegedly died at the hands of the skippers now arrested in this investigation.
Three of the detainees were located in the Las Raíces reception center, in La Laguna (Tenerife). The duty court in that city sent them to prison with eight counts of murder, in addition to injuries, degrading treatment, crimes against the rights of foreign citizens and failure to provide assistance, as advanced last week by the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands.
To those three detainees, another four have been added, also in pre-trial detention by order of the duty courts of the cities of the peninsula where they were located and arrested.
According to the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands, the people who were murdered aboard that boat during its eight days of crossing were selected to be killed due to their nationality, different from that of the alleged perpetrators.
Second case of murders in boats in a month
This is the second case in just one month in which cases of murder have been uncovered in boats heading to the Canary Islands.
The previous one, which was also reported by the Civil Guard on December 29, took place on November 3, on a boat that arrived in El Hierro with 207 occupants after six days of navigation from Senegal.
On that boat, four people were murdered two days before the boat arrived in the Canary Islands.
The Civil Guard arrested seven people for these events and the investigation began as a result of the testimonies of the occupants of the boat, who stated that the journey they had made had been "a real nightmare".
The agents were able to verify that the boat had initially departed from Gambia and that it made a stop on the Senegalese island of Bassoul, where most of the occupants boarded.
Three days after sailing, three of the skippers, in charge of ensuring order inside the boat, decided to take reprisals against several migrants.
The reason was that one of the occupants, possibly affected by the harshness of the trip, suffered an episode of disorientation, causing the three skippers to blame him for the misfortune of the journey and give him several beatings, both to him and to those who defended him.
As punishment, they allegedly decided to murder four of them to intimidate the rest of the migrants on the boat, according to the testimonies collected by the Civil Guard.
The authorities have identified three of the victims in this case, whose families have been informed of the deaths and the arrest of the alleged perpetrators.
Efforts are being made to find out the identity of the fourth victim and to contact their relatives.
Within the group of migrants who arrived in El Hierro in that boat on November 3, there was also a man who needed to be operated on urgently, because he had a deep wound in his chest, compatible with a stab wound.
