112 incident

The body of a young migrant has been found on the west coast of Malaga - the fourth in 24 hours

The discovery was made on Wednesday in Manilva and everything suggests that the young man, who was wearing a wetsuit and a flipper, was attempting to swim from Morocco to Ceuta

31/07/2026 a las 12:32h.

The body of a young migrant was recovered on Wednesday off the west coast of Malaga. This is the fourth body that the emergency services ... have recovered from the sea in the province in just 24 hours. The discovery was made at around five o’clock in the afternoon, when a sailing boat spotted the body floating off the port of La Duquesa, in the municipality of Manilva. A patrol boat from the Malaga provincial maritime service was dispatched to the scene to recover the body.

According to the coroner’s initial on-site examination, the victim was aged between 20 and 25 and was wearing a wetsuit, swimming trunks and a single flipper. According to sources at the Malaga government sub-delegation office consulted by SUR, the cause of death appears to be drowning.

The body was recovered from the water at around seven o’clock in the evening and was then taken to the institute of forensic medicine (IML) in Malaga, where a post-mortem examination will definitively establish the circumstances of the death.

This discovery comes on top of the three bodies recovered on Tuesday at other points along the west coast, between Estepona and Manilva, during operations coordinated by the Guardia Civil and the maritime rescue service.

The first body on Tuesday was found at around 1pm, 22 miles east of the coast of Estepona. Given the advanced state of decomposition, it is estimated that the body may have been in the sea for weeks. Later, at around 6.50 pm, a maritime rescue vessel recovered a second body near a mussel farm situated a few metres from the port of Estepona; the victim was a young man aged between 19 and 20. The third body was found in the Punta Chullera area, in Manilva, where the body of another man, under the age of 30, was discovered. Like the victim found the previous day, two of these three victims were wearing wetsuits and flippers.

Officers from the Guardia Civil’s judicial police and the judicial delegation took charge of removing the bodies found on Tuesday for subsequent transfer to the Malaga forensic medicine institute.

According to sources, all the evidence suggests that the victims were attempting to swim from Morocco to the coast of Ceuta. The prevailing sea currents in the Strait of Gibraltar are thought to have eventually swept them towards the province of Malaga after they were left adrift due to disorientation or physical exhaustion.