They survived for two weeks on the Atlantic by gnawing the wood of their boat for moisture, and were rescued only after 12 of their companions had died.
The attempt by 18 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa to reach the Canary Islands was not unusual, but the story of how they came to be discovered drifting 120 miles south of Gran Canaria last week has proved to be one of the cruellest and most dramatic.
”There were 20 of us in the little fishing boat,” said Yazee, a Ghanaian, from his hospital bed in Tenerife. ”The engine broke after we had been at sea for a day.
”The two Moroccans who were captaining the boat made a call on their mobile phone and then another boat arrived. We thought we were all being saved. But the captains got on it and left, leaving 18 of us adrift,” he said.
The migrants had boarded the small, open fishing boat at a beach near Layooune, the capital of the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, after paying â,¬500 each.
This is the final stage of the trip into Europe for thousands of Africans every year who have worked their way north through countries such as Niger, Mali, Algeria and Morocco.
”We were told to just bring a little bit of water,” said Bubacare, another survivor.
The trip along what is now the major immigrant route into Spain should take barely a day, with immigrants putting ashore at night on the islands of Fuerteventura or Lanzarote.
”As time passed, our companions started to die and we threw them overboard,” said Daniel, another Ghanaian.
The castaways’ only hope was the mobile phone carried by one of them. He rang a relative 1 200 miles away in Barcelona who contacted the Spanish coastguard. Soon, however, his battery and calling credit ran out.
A search and rescue mission was launched, but a combination of bad weather and uncertainty of the boat’s location meant they could not be found.
After a week, the Spanish authorities gave up, convinced — as storms battered the eastern edge of the Atlantic — the passengers had met the same watery grave as dozens, if not hundreds, of other African migrants in recent years.
Rainstorms provided the survivors with the one thing they most needed, some fresh water. But there were still days when they drank salt water from the sea.
”I covered my lips with toothpaste before drinking sips of water from the sea, so that the salt water would not burn them,” said Yazee. ”I thought I was going to die.”
Then Juan Antonio Barreiro, captain of the Naboeiro — a trawler that had drifted out of its normal fishing grounds — saw what he described as a ”strange object” bobbing in the sea and decided to take a closer look. ”We just got curious,” he said.
It turned out to be the tiny boat, with the immigrants lying in the bottom. ”They seemed to be almost dead,” he said.
”Only two of them were even able to reach out for the water bottles we handed them. The rest could not move.”
A Spanish helicopter finally rescued the terrified survivors. ”I wasn’t sure whether they looked so scared because of what had happened to them or what they thought we might do to them,” said Anabel Dominguez, who was waiting for them when they landed on the island of Tenerife.
”They had been chewing the side of the boat, probably to try to get moisture from it,” a police officer told the newspaper El Pais.
Yesterday the survivors were slowly regaining strength in a Tenerife hospital.
Authorities have yet to say whether they will enforce the rules they apply to all illegal immigrants by expelling them back either to their home countries or to Morocco. – Guardian Unlimited Â