Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 16th of January 2020
Case name: 2020_01_16-WM446
Situation: 27 travellers arrived safely on the Canary Islands.
Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded
Place of Incident: Western Mediterranean Sea

Summary of the Case: At 16h36 CET of Thursday the 16th of January, the Alarm phone was alerted to a boat in distress that had left from Dakhla two and a half days earlier (during the night of Monday the 13th of January). The boat was carrying 28 travellers including 8 women and one child. After having unsuccessfully attempted to establish contact with the travellers, at 17h35 we alerted the Spanish coastguard in Las Palmas (Canary Island) about the case, both by phone and by email. During the rest of the evening we continuously tried to reach the travellers but with no success. At 11h36 the following morning we called the Spanish coastguard in Las Palmas who informed us that search with an aircraft was on-going. At 15h25 the coastguard again told us that the search was on-going but that they had found nothing yet. At 16h30 the coastguard informed us that there had just been an arrival of around 30 travellers on the West coast of Tenerife. At 17h22 the coastguard forwarded us an email from the guardia civil that confirmed the a arrival of a boat carrying 18 young men, 8 women and 1 child, everyone had been medically checked and was in good health. The boat was a white rowing boat of around six meters. Although this boat was carrying 27 travellers and not 28, we believed that this could be our case. To further receive confirmation that this was our case we asked to check whether the telephone numbers that we had of the travellers corresponded with those of the people that had arrived. At 18h48 we received an email from the coastguard confirming that the people that had arrived were from our case. Our contact person that had alerted us in the first place also confirmed this information.