Eight dead after 'migrant boat' capsizes off Senegal coast

Eight people died when a wooden boat capsized off the coast of northern Senegal, the interior minister said Thursday, along a route sometimes used by migrants to reach Spain's Canary Islands.

Local media reported that the boat was carrying migrants and said the death toll could be much higher, as such pirogues – long wooden fishing boats – were often packed with people.

Speaking from Saint-Louis in northern Senegal, where he visited the injured in hospital, Interior Minister Antoine Felix Diome declined to say how many people had been on board the boat or if any were missing.

"There are eight lifeless bodies and four injured," he said.

According to a local official, the boat had departed from southern Senegal and the accident occurred early on Wednesday.

The news follows reports by the Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras that three other boats that had left from Senegal are missing.

It said they were carrying more than 300 migrants.

One of them left on 27 June from Kafountine, a small coastal town in the south of Senegal, with around 200 people on board, the NGO said.

The other two boats, with around 120 people on board, left Mbour on the Senegalese coast on 23 June, it added.

Dakar has said separately that at least 260 Senegalese had been "rescued" in Moroccan territorial waters between 28 June and 9 July.

On Thursday, Diome said 276 people were in Morocco and "doing well".

Caminando Fronteras said those people had also left Senegal but had not been on the boats carrying the 300 missing people.

Separately, the Senegalese navy intercepted a fishing boat carrying 71 migrants overnight, the army said in a statement published on social media Thursday.

The navy boarded the boat near the mouth of the Senegal River, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean, and handed the passengers over to the gendarmerie, it said.