11 migrants die in shipwreck off Algeria

Eleven people drowned and five others were rescued after their boat sank off Algeria as they attempted to reach Europe, a private television station and a Spanish aid group said Monday.

The El-Hayet channel said on its Facebook page that “11 clandestine migrants who set sail from Fouka (near Tipaza, west of Algiers) have died and five young people, two of them children, were rescued”.

Spanish NGO Cipimd, which specialises in identifying missing migrants, tweeted that “a boat carrying 16 people, including women and children, was shipwrecked on Sunday evening” off Tipaza.

“They were heading towards the Balearic archipelago,” it said.

Several Algerian social media users posted images of the victims, saying they were all from the town of Fouka, some 70 kilometres (42 miles) west of Algiers.

Those who survived spent 14 hours in the water before being rescued by an Egyptian vessel which handed them over to Algerian authorities, they said.

The Algerian coast guard has “thwarted several attempts at illegal emigration and rescued 172 people aboard makeshift boats”, between May 4 and 11, according to the defence ministry.

In 2021, 4,404 migrants died or went missing during desperate attempts to reach Spain, the worst toll since 2015, according to the Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras.