Police in The Gambia have made a high-profile arrest in connection with the death at sea of 63 irregular migrants off the coast of Mauritania last week, APA can report on Tuesday.
Alhaji Faye, the chief of the riverside town of Barra where the ill-fated boat packed with over 190 ‘back way’ migrants set sail last week, is being detained by the fraud squad unit of the Gambian police.
Local accounts suggest Faye had been involved with people smugglers to organise the trip while one Sanna Marong allegedly provided the boat which was bound for Spain’s Canary Islands but never made it past the coastal city of Nouadhibou in Mauritania, 1, 133km away.
Faye who runs a gas station in Barra, a town of roughly 10, 000 people denied any wrongdoing.
Two of his alleged accomplices identified as Sanna Marong and Ousman Bahoum are reportedly still at large, apparently on the run.
President Adama Barrow had vowed that his government will hunt down and prosecute those found responsible for organising the boat trip.
Meanwhile Barra and its immediate environs are reeling from the sheer scale of the maritime disaster since most of those who perished originated from the area.
There were ambulances rushing through the town and its surroundings every few hours on Monday afternoon as both the survivors and those who died return from Mauritania.
Perched just north of the capital Banjul and across an estuary where the River Gambia empties into the Atlantic Ocean, the otherwise sleepy coastal town was the staging post for the boatload of irregular migrants which hit a rock and capsized off Nouhadhibou last Wednesday.
63 had died, 85 survived by the skin of their teeth and 47 were declared missing by the Mauritanian authorities.
At least 15 of those who died have been identified as Senegalese nationals.
Aside from the tragic boat, two other vessels packed with irregular migrants that set sail from the town were intercepted by Mauritanian coastguards.
WN/as/APA