The Civil Guard confirmed this Tuesday that the human remains found on a beach in Roda de Berà belong to an eight-month-old baby who was traveling in a pneumatic boat that sank ten kilometers off the coast of Denia last spring. It was the main hypothesis among those that were considered. Her little girl was called Lilia, an Algerian girl who undertook the perilous journey from her native country on March 21, in the arms of her mother and in the company of her father. She did it, as usual, in a boat overloaded with her capacity, with a total of 16 people on board. None of them survived.
The International Center for the Identification of Disappeared Migrants (CIPIMD) assures this newspaper that the corpse found on the Tarragona coast is Lilia. As soon as the news broke on July 11, the NGO in charge of searching, finding and identifying migrants at the request of families or institutions contacted the Civil Guard to collaborate with the investigation. “We are not aware of the disappearances of other people with so few months to live during those dates. It had to be Lilia,” they point out from the CIPIMD to this newspaper.
The organization affirms that the shipwreck occurred long before the date indicated by the police force in its informative note (April 6), since the first two corpses appeared on the Alicante coast, entangled in fishing nets, two days after the clandestine departure from one of the Cherchel beaches, a common departure point on migratory routes from Africa. They are people who risk their lives – after paying thousands of euros – with the dream of reaching the Peninsula and stepping on European territory. The destination on this occasion was Eivissa.
Lilia’s DNA samples match those of a woman whose body was recovered at the beginning of April precisely on the coast of the Balearic island, as determined by the Criminalistics Service of the Civil Guard thanks to the database of the genetic profiles. In later days, corpses also appeared in Cartagena (1) and again in Alicante (8), as well as in Roda de Berà. There are still three missing. Except for the mother and Lilia, they were all men, mostly Algerians (four were sub-Saharan).
When more than 48 hours have passed since the families have not heard from their relatives, the usual procedure is to contact the CIPIMD, which has a particularly extensive network of contacts with Algeria, so that they can help them find them. They must fill out a form on their website detailing physical aspects and later request images of the disappeared. The NGO also acts as an interlocutor with the Civil Guard to try to find them.
In the case of Lilia, when they identified the body of the mother -already repatriated-, they informed the relatives of the tragedy and told them that “if the sea was benevolent, it would return the little girl’s body.” Originally from Tipaza, her mother is already buried in that town. The family is also waiting for the repatriation of the little girl’s body, as well as that of her father, also recovered from the sea.
The Algerian Route is one of the four great African migratory routes with Spain as a destination (the other three are the Canary Islands, the Ceuta and Melilla fence and the Strait of Gibraltar). A recent report from the Caminando Fronteras collective indicates that in the first half of the year 102 people died when they were heading towards the Valencian Community, Murcia or the Balearic Islands. That’s one death every two days.
Until June 2023, the Ministry of the Interior records that a total of 12,192 people arrived in Spain by boat, cayucos or pneumatics, 4.17% less than during the first six months of the previous year. There have been 49 tragedies in boats, eight of them on the Argelia Route.
Caminando Sin Fronteras points out that fatalities on maritime routes to Spain are increasing despite the reduction in the flow of small boats.
