At least 70 people were killed when a boat carrying migrants capsized off the coast of West Africa, Gambia's foreign affairs ministry said late on Friday, in one of the deadliest accidents in recent years along a popular migration route to Europe.
Another 30 people are feared dead after the vessel, believed to have departed from Gambia and carrying mostly Gambian and Senegalese nationals, sank off the coast of Mauritania early on Wednesday, the ministry said in a statement.
It was carrying an estimated 150 passengers, 16 of whom had been rescued.
Mauritanian authorities recovered 70 bodies on Wednesday and Thursday, and witness accounts suggest over 100 may have died, the statement said.
The Atlantic migration route from the coast of West Africa to the Canary Islands, typically used by African migrants trying to reach Spain, is one of the world's deadliest.
More than 46,000 irregular migrants reached the Canary Islands last year, a record, according to the European Union. More than 10,000 died attempting the journey, a 58% increase over 2023, according to the rights group Caminando Fronteras.
Gambia's foreign affairs ministry implored its nationals to "refrain from embarking on such perilous journeys, which continue to claim the lives of many.”
In July 2024, more than a dozen migrants died and 150 were declared missing off the coast of Mauritania.
Last Wednesday, Human Rights Watch said Mauritanian security forces committed serious human rights violations between 2020 and early 2025 against largely West and Central African migrants and asylum seekers, often when they were seeking to leave or transit the country.
In its 142-page report, the group documents abuses by the Mauritanian police, coast guard, navy, gendarmerie, and army during border and migration control, including torture, rape, and other violence; arbitrary arrests and detention; inhumane detention conditions; racist treatment; extortion and theft; and summary and collective expulsions.
Dozens of people who had been held in Mauritania’s police-run migrant detention centers described inhumane conditions and treatment, including lack of food and poor sanitation, HRW said.
The group said between 2020 and mid-2025, Mauritanian police expelled tens of thousands of African foreigners of multiple nationalities to remote locations along the borders with Mali and Senegal, where limited aid, plus worsening insecurity in Mali’s Kayes region, has put people at risk.
HRW said the crackdowns and rights violations were exacerbated by the European Union and Spain, bilaterally, continuing to outsource migration management to Mauritania, including through years of support to Mauritania’s border and migration control authorities.
Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras estimates that about 10,457 people died or went missing at sea in 2024 alone while attempting to reach Spain.
