SURFERS ON a Spanish beach pulled six drowning illegal immigrants from the Atlantic off the Canary Islands, but were unable to save 21 others whose bodies were recovered yesterday.
Christian Hunt, a Uruguayan surfer who lives by the Los Cocoteros beach in Lanzarote, managed to take the six to land on his surfboard after the small fishing boat in which were travelling capsized just over 18m (60ft) offshore.
Mr Hunt’s friends pulled them through the fierce surf and on to the beach using a lifebelt attached to a rope. “The tide was very strong and the waves made the rescue much more difficult,” he said. “They were all turning purple, with hypothermia setting in, and were about to give up.”
With the help of another local surfer, Johnny Camarasa, he managed six trips to the boat before night fell on Sunday. By yesterday afternoon, rescue services had recovered the bodies of 21 other people who had made the trip from the west coast of Morocco.
Authorities said three others were still missing. Fourteen of the dead may have been children, according to Red Cross sources. Several were reported to have been aged under 10.
Mr Hunt said he ran into the surf from his beachside house after his wife saw that the boat had capsized. “When I got out there it was already a nightmare scenario. There were people floating off, the boat was overturned and several people were still holding on to it,” he said. “They would all have gone to the bottom if they hadn’t managed to grab the boat.”
While he threw himself into the water, his wife ran to get the surfboard, which he used to ferry the immigrants towards the beach. Mr Hunt said that on one of his journeys to the boat a 14-year-old boy told him to look for a smaller child first. “I hadn’t realised that he himself was so young,” he said.
Several people had already drowned by then. “On one occasion when I got back to the boat I could see that there were five or six people who had already gone under.” Anibal Betancourt, who took part in the rescue, said the survivors “were clinging to the sinking boat and screaming”.
“You feel totally useless, seeing the people like that,” he said. “You can’t do anything with the sea so rough.” Thousands of people are thought to have died on the hazardous migrant route from west Africa to the Canary Islands in recent years.
Increased surveillance and co-operation with African nations reduced the numbers reaching the islands by 25 per cent to 13,500 last year. – (Guardian service)