Three corpses in different states of decomposition have been found and rescued from the sea off the coast of Alicante in the last two days, according to sources from the Civil Guard. The remains, of two men and one woman, have been transferred to the Alicante Institute of Legal Medicine for analysis, while officers from the Judicial Police of the Alicante Command are already investigating the discovery to try to establish the circumstances in which the deaths occurred.
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The findings began this Wednesday the 29th, in the morning. The body of a man appeared floating off the coast of El Campello, a town located 15 kilometers north of the provincial capital. Already on the morning of this Thursday, the remains of another man, who could be a minor, were sighted off the coast of Cabo de las Huertas, in the municipality of Alicante. Hours later, the body of a woman was rescued in a place near the island of Tabarca, 12 nautical miles south of the city.
The Civil Guard points out that none of the three people have been identified and suspects that they could come from shipwrecks of one vessel, but they could also correspond to several, because their different state of decomposition indicates that some could have been adrift longer than others. The entire southeastern coast of the Peninsula, between Almería and Valencia, and the Balearic Islands are usual points of arrival or sighting of small boats carrying migrants, usually sub-Saharan, from the coasts of Algeria.
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One possibility is that one of the deceased rescued this Thursday in Alicante was part of a vessel that was boarded on April 20 off the coast of Cartagena (Region of Murcia). On the ship, which presumably set sail from Algiers, two people were found alive and three dead, and later five more corpses appeared off Cabo de Palos, also on the Murcian coast. The hypothesis in this case is that initially 13 more people were traveling, so some of the bodies found in Alicante could belong to this small boat. The sources consulted indicate that investigators cannot link the remains discovered this Thursday with the Cartagena boat.
Although the western Mediterranean usually presents better maritime conditions than the Atlantic, shipwrecks with loss of life are frequent on the crossing between North Africa and southern Spain. In March, a man was sentenced in Alicante to eight years in prison for captaining a vessel in which five people died, four of them migrants, whose bodies were thrown into the sea, and the fifth, the second in command, whose body was still on the ship when it was rescued off the coast of Xàbia, north of the province of Alicante. Apparently, he had embarked 19 Somalis to whom he had charged 4,200 euros per head for the trip. The court found him guilty of a crime against the rights of foreign citizens.
