A two-year-old girl from Mali who was rescued from a migrant boat and resuscitated on a dock in the Canary Islands last week has died in hospital, becoming the latest victim of the perilous Atlantic route from Africa to Europe.
The girl was one of 52 people travelling on a boat that had left the city of Dakhla in Western Sahara bound for the Spanish archipelago.
The boat – which was carrying 29 women, 14 men and nine children – was found last Tuesday by Spain’s maritime rescue service. Many of the occupants were showing signs of hypothermia and dehydration after being at sea for five days.
They were brought ashore at the port of Arguineguín on Gran Canaria, where Red Cross workers raced to save the girl, who was unconscious and whose heart had stopped. Pictures of their frantic efforts to resuscitate the toddler appeared in the Spanish media, providing a further reminder of the dangers of the Atlantic route, which has claimed 19 lives so far this year.
The toddler was taken to the intensive care unit of a children’s hospital in the island’s capital, Las Palmas, where she died on Sunday.
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, described her death as “as a cry that touches all our consciences”, adding: “There are no words to describe so much pain.”
Ángel Víctor Torres, the regional president of the Canary Islands, tweeted: “We saw the painful images of her arrival on the islands and today, her death. [She] is the face of the humanitarian drama that migration represents … She was looking for a better life. She was two years old.”
The toddler’s death comes a little over four years after the body of Samuel Kabamba – a four-year-old from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who died trying to reach Europe with his mother – washed up on a beach in southern Spain.
The deaths of Samuel and his mother, Véronique Nzazi, prompted calls for greater action to reduce the risks of migration, and also gave rise to comparisons with Alan Kurdi, the two-year-old Syrian refugee whose death in 2015 briefly forced the world to focus on the human cost of the migration crisis.
More than 40,300 people arrived in Spain by sea last year, with more than 25,000 of them arriving in the Canary Islands, causing the archipelago’s reception infrastructure to buckle under the strain.
Conflicts, land border closures forced by the Covid pandemic and increased controls in some north African countries have led smuggling gangs to reactivate the long and dangerous Atlantic crossing. At least 593 people died en route to the Canaries in 2020, compared with 210 in 2019 and 45 in 2018.
Last month, Spanish police released photographs and video footage of people trying to reach Europe from north Africa by hiding in containers of broken bottles and in sealed bags of toxic ash.
Ministers from Greece, Italy, Spain, Cyprus and Malta met in Athens on Sunday to reiterate calls for solidarity in managing mass migration to the EU, insisting the burden had to be shared more justly with other countries in the bloc.
