(AP) Spanish police say they have detained five men for allegedly navigating two migrant boats to the Canary Islands and being responsible for the deaths of some of its passengers.
The men are being investigated for “favoring illegal immigration” with three of them also being investigated for homicide, Spain’s national police said in a statement released Friday. A judge ordered four of them to be held in custody.
The arrests come after an investigation was launched into two boats that arrived in the islands of Gran Canaria and Lanzarote on March 16 and April 2, respectively.
In the first boat, 62 migrants and asylum seekers had departed the coast of Dakhla, in Morocco-controlled Western Sahara, and spent five days with little food or water trying to reach the Canaries.
