The Spanish Civil Guard intercepted on Wednesday a migrant boat with 14 dead illegal immigrants and several injured ones and towed it to Puerto Arguineguin, south of Gran Canaria, Xinhua quoted the Emergency and Security Coordinator Center (Cecoes) as saying. The Civil Guard intercepted the boat one nautical mile from Arguineguin in the morning, and it discovered 13 corpses on board, although it later recovered another body from the sea eight miles from the coast. A total of 46 people, two women among them, reached the shore alive. According to the survivors, they had been drifting at sea for some ten days. "They were lost several times, suffered an engine failure and were drifting for many days," a Red Cross spokesman said. A total of 7,165 illegal immigrants have tried to reach Spain's coasts in small boats this year until July 31, which is lower than the one registered in the same period in 2007, when 7,883 people were rescued.
