“I was saved by a man who grabbed on to my shirt. Now he is dead”
One of the immigrants rescued from the sea last week tells her tragic story
It happened around 1pm on Thursday, just two hours before Spanish rescue services arrived at the spot where Marie was sitting on the remains of a boat that had split in two 11 miles off the Moroccan coastal city of Alhucemas. The rescuers managed to pluck 18 survivors out of the sea, including Marie, 27, who is three months pregnant and was born in a village near Djamena, the capital of Chad.
They also recovered the bodies of 14 other boat passengers who died following the shipwreck. But the real body count was a lot higher than that. “It was 50, because there were 68 of us on the boat,” says Marie. “I was saved by a man who grabbed my shirt and lifted me onto the zodiac. Now he is dead.”
This interview took place inside a cafeteria near the shelter for migrant women in an Andalusian city. Her caregivers suspect that before her tragic sea journey, back when she was still in Morocco waiting for a chance to reach Europe, she might have been the victim of a human trafficking ring. “Marie” is not her real name.
Because she was pregnant, Marie avoided being taken to an alien detention center in Tarifa (Cádiz), like the other rescued migrants. A 15-year-old survivor was sent to a juvenile center instead. Still wearing the dark grey fleece and black sweatpants that the Red Cross gave her to replace her own wet clothes, Marie recounted the horror of her journey dispassionately.
“They woke us up around midnight on Wednesday and took us out of the abandoned house where we were sheltering from the cold after spending several nights out in the open. The Moroccans were very strict and they yelled at us to hurry up. They walked us to the beach. Then they inflated the zodiac in front of us, and after they attached the motor we were off.”
Marie explains that the 68 migrants — whose exact number she swears to, because she spent “many days” with them before the sea journey — were all traveling on one vessel. “Some of us were on the buoyancy tubes, but in the central part, sitting close together, there were a lot more. We were packed like sardines,” she explains. “We left early in the morning and we saw an airplane flying over us.”
It may have been the EU Frontex surveillance aircraft, which photographed a semi-rigid inflatable boat in the area at 1.20am. “We also ran into another boat, but when it saw us it turned off its lights. It wanted nothing to do with us.”
The problems began later, around 9am, when the engine went dead. “Everyone started screaming, others prayed in silence.” The man at the helm, or “the skipper,” as Marie calls him, managed to fix the problem and they went on their way. But around midmorning the water started to seep in. “Suddenly, the floor broke in half and we all fell in the water.”
Marie figures it must have been around 1pm when panic took hold of the passengers. “I was wearing a life jacket, while others had life preservers. But most of them had nothing, and almost no one knew how to swim. Myself included. I just floated. The sea was slowly dragging me away from the boat. But a man came toward me, grabbed me by the neck of my shirt and pulled me back toward the ropes on the zodiac.” At first she held on to them with her hands, but she was out of strength “because of the cold and several days without eating,” so she wrapped the ropes around her forearms.
“He was a young man, about 25, who spoke French,” says Marie. “He knew how to swim and he saved many people. I think he was from some country in western Africa, but when the Spaniards came to save us he was no longer there. He died for sure, yet here I am. Most of them are dead and many were strong young men, much stronger than me.” This is the only moment in the entire interview when her voice breaks, and even though she does not cry, her eyes are glistening. “It was God who decided that I should live.”
Marie remembers that another pregnant woman was among the dead. She was around seven months gone. Her husband managed to save her and bring her close to the rubber dinghy, but she fell in again and drowned. He survived. “When we reached Spain he was screaming and crying. He was delirious.”
“People were desperate to reach the ropes or climb onto the rings,” she adds. “They were hitting one another, pulling each other back. One of them even stepped on me.”
In total, they must have spent around two hours in the water, she thinks. When the Spanish rescue boat took them to Alhucemas, Morocco refused to take them in save for one, and so it was that they arrived in Motril.
Marie says she just wants to find work, taking care of children or seniors. She doesn’t yet know the sex of the baby. “I want it to be a girl,” she says. What will you call it? “I already made my mind up,” she answers. “Victoria.”
Alien detention centers struggle to cope with mass influx of migrants
Despite the bad weather in the Strait of Gibraltar, the flow of African migrants is unrelenting. So far 34 people have been rescued since early Tuesday morning as they tried to reach the Spanish coast from Morocco. Among the undocumented migrants, who were traveling in six boats, were three women and a baby.
This brings the number of people rescued in these waters since last weekend. They were trying to reach Spain on 16 vessels, most of them small inflatable boats that were unfit for such a crossing.
The influx has also underscored how the alien detention centers in Algeciras and Tarifa are ill-prepared to deal with such numbers of undocumented migrants. At press time, both centers were holding 260 people and were expecting 46 more. Maximum capacity is 280.
The Algeciras center is a former prison where migrants have to deal with high humidity and a lack of restrooms. After undergoing a facelift (the prison bars remain, however) it has become a temporary shelter for 120 people. Meanwhile the Las Palomas center, in Tarifa, has enjoyed a better refurbishment but is equally saturated.
Juan Antonio Morillo, the secretary of the (SUP) police union, has stated “the need to definitively shut down these facilities,” in reference to the Algeciras center. The local council has approved “requesting speedier construction of a new CIE \[alien detention center\] in order to be able to shut down the current facilities as soon as possible, due to the bad state they are in.”
