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Crew members on board the Sapphire Princess cruise ship made a grim discovery late on Tuesday April 21 when they spotted five bodies floating in the sea around 140 miles off the coast of Cabo de Palos.

 

The ship had set sail from Cagliari, on the Italian island of Sardinia, and after the alarm was raised, a search operation was launched covering the area for several hours to check whether any more bodies were in the water. The ship eventually docked at the port of Cartagena and the five bodies were transferred to the Institute of Legal Medicine where post-mortems will be carried out.

 

Spain's National Police are now investigating whether the five victims were among those on board a small boat that was found adrift around 25 miles off Cartagena earlier in the week. A French military ship spotted it drifting and raised the alarm, and the maritime rescue vessel Salvamar Draco was dispatched to the scene, where crew found two survivors and three people who had already died. The survivors were brought to safety and the three bodies were taken to the port of Santa Lucía, where the formal process for handling the remains was set in motion.

 

According to the two survivors, the boat left the coastal area of Mostaganem in Algeria with 18 people on board. Based on their accounts, police believe 13 people are still unaccounted for, and investigators are now working to establish whether the five bodies recovered by the cruise ship belong to that group.

One of the two survivors has since been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter and facilitating illegal immigration, according to sources close to the case.

 

The journey between the Algerian coast and the Region of Murcia typically takes between 10 and 20 hours, depending on the boat, its engine and conditions at sea, which makes the timeline here deeply troubling. Investigators believe the vessel may have been adrift for close to three weeks, and are looking at the possibility of engine failure or a sudden deterioration in the weather as the most likely reasons it ended up stranded so far from shore.

 

As the days would have passed, the situation on board is thought to have become increasingly desperate, with supplies of fuel, food and water running out.

 

Police are also looking into whether one of the survivors was actually piloting the boat, and are trying to piece together a full picture of what happened from the moment it left Algeria to the moment it was finally found. According to sources close to the investigation, the results of the post-mortems are expected to be key in establishing exactly how the victims died and shedding more light on what has become yet another devastating tragedy in the Mediterranean.