Africa-Press – Gambia. A court in Spain’s Canary Islands has freed a captain of a boat on which 22 migrants, mainly Gambians, reportedly died in 2023.
According to Tenerife Weekly newspaper of Spain, the Santa Cruz de Tenerife provincial court released the young man from The Gambia who had been imprisoned for two years as the alleged captain of the boat. This decision comes after the court recognised him as a minor. If convicted, he could have been imprisoned for 15 years.
The judges acknowledged that the authenticity of the identity documents provided by him in 2023 — his birth certificate and passport — has not been formally contested and that no reports have sufficiently rebutted his minor status “with compelling evidence”, even though forensic evidence attributed him an age of up to 21 years.
The court reiterated that the Supreme Court of Spain established that “in the face of reasonable doubt regarding the age of an accused, and while certain data is lacking, their minority status must be presumed”.
The boat captain whose name has been withheld for legal reasons, arrived in Los Cristianos, Tenerife, on 28th October 2023, after a nine-day journey from The Gambia aboard a boat with 226 people. Tragically, one child arrived deceased. Another fellow traveller died shortly after reaching the hospital.
However, the total number of deceased was even higher. Survivors reported at the dock that between ten and twenty additional individuals had died at sea due to a lack of food and water.
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