The sun had not yet risen when the tuna boat in which four young adults and a minor were traveling crashed against the rocks of La Condesa, in the town of Órzola, two days ago. Among the survivors, the 17-year-old Moroccan national arrived on the island. This minor and his companions declared that they had spent four days without eating or drinking.
While the adults went to a Temporary Foreigners Attention Center, as happens with arrivals by boat, the minor was taken in by the General Directorate of Childhood of the Government of the Canary Islands and will be transferred before September 25 to the Spanish peninsula.
This young man will be the first unaccompanied migrant minor to star in an express transfer to the peninsula. According to the Minister of Territorial Policy, Ángel Víctor Torres, this minor will be subject to the Royal Decree approved in March, which establishes a transfer to the peninsula within 15 days if he has arrived in a territory declared in migratory contingency, as is the case of the Canary Islands.
Torres has indicated that these relocations must be carried out with the utmost security, because the right of minors prevails above all, whose guardianship changes with respect to the place where they arrived.
An unusual arrival
The boat ran aground, amidst alarms and shouts, the crew slid down a rope from the bow of the boat and touched land, helped by the firefighters of the Lanzarote Emergency Consortium.
That image, with a large boat stranded and five migrants, is not the usual one on an island like Lanzarote, accustomed to rescuing migrants who risk their lives in much smaller and more precarious boats.
The tuna boat had left the Moroccan city of Agadir and its crew did not have a GPS to guide them on the journey, so they ended up running aground in Órzola, where in 2020 and 2021 there were two tragic shipwrecks that ended the lives of dozens of people.
The indications handled by the National Police and the Civil Guard seem to indicate that this tuna boat, which caught fire and was destroyed by the waves on the same day of its arrival and caused the activation of the national maritime plan due to environmental pollution, was actually a pater boat.
