'It's very painful': Dakar in shock after new migrant shipwreck

Senegal

Senegal faced a new tragedy on the migration route linking West Africa to the Canary Islands: at least fifteen lifeless bodies were found Monday morning off Dakar.

"They were migrants a priori", Samba Kandji, deputy mayor of the Ouakam district, told AFP.

Gendarmes and firefighters were on a beach in this district of the capital, below the cliff-topped corniche near the Divinité mosque, where the search for other bodies or possible survivors was concentrated on Monday, an AFP journalist noted.

"A total of 17 victims were counted, including fifteen lifeless bodies and two survivors," Martial Ndione, commander of the Dakar fire department, told reporters.

"The navy forced the boat to dock and people ran away. Some jumped off but didn't know how to swim," Mr. Kandji had told AFP earlier.

"I express my deep sorrow at the death of some fifteen Senegalese in the sinking of a pirogue off Dakar," reacted President Macky Sall in a tweet.

Interior Minister Antoine Felix Abdoulaye Diome visited the site of the shipwreck on Monday afternoon, according to local media and images on his department's Twitter account.

The Minister told private radio station RFM that according to "initial information", which he said had yet to be confirmed, the boat had set off from a Dakar fishing district, Thiaroye, "made a stopover" in Yarakh, another nearby fishing area, before ending up in Ouakam.

Bodies fished out

A wooden boat, presumed to have carried the migrants according to several witnesses on the beach, was floating on the water near the coast. An AFP journalist saw the fire department fish out a body and place it on a tarpaulin on the beach.

"This morning, at around 3:30 am, we were alerted to a capsized pirogue off Ouakam. Two teams of divers and four ambulances were immediately dispatched to the scene, and operations got underway," said Mr. Ndione.

A few dozen onlookers on the beach were watching the operations unfold on Monday morning, before rain temporarily interrupted the search. "It's painful to see all these dead people," said one of them, Amndy Moustapha Sène, 23, who earns his living from trading and gardening and dreams of becoming a professional footballer.

"I dreamed of going to Europe because the horizon here is blocked. I was ready to get into a pirogue, but now I've decided to emigrate legally when the opportunity arises. I don't want to take a pirogue to leave. It's not worth it", he assures us.

In recent weeks, the migratory route to the Canaries, a Spanish archipelago and gateway to Europe in the Atlantic Ocean, has seen a marked increase in activity from the coasts of north-west Africa.

Several tragedies have occurred in the last two weeks. At least thirteen migrants from the Dakar area died when their boat sank around a week ago off the coast of Morocco. Another boat capsized in Saint-Louis (north), killing at least fourteen.