A senior emergency official in Spain's Canary Islands says human traffickers threw a two-year-old boy from a migrant boat into the Atlantic because the child would not stop crying, one of several alleged atrocities committed during recent crossings to Lanzarote.
Enrique Espinosa, chief of Lanzarote's Emergency Services Consortium, made the claim during an appearance on the Cronicas Radio program A Buena Hora, describing conditions aboard migrant vessels that he said go far beyond what most people imagine. The toddler, Espinosa said, was traveling with his mother when traffickers on the boat allegedly hurled him into the open ocean. No date for the incident has been made public, and The Sun reported that it remains unclear whether police are actively investigating the child's death.
Espinosa did not identify the child or his mother by name, nor did he specify how many people were aboard the vessel. But his account paints a grim picture of lawlessness on the Atlantic route, a corridor increasingly dominated by criminal trafficking networks that treat human cargo as disposable.
On the radio program, Espinosa described a pattern of brutality that extends well beyond a single incident. He framed the toddler's alleged killing as part of a broader wave of violence perpetrated by trafficking gangs operating with impunity on the open water.
Espinosa told Cronicas Radio:
"On a boat, they threw a two-year-old child who was crying with his mother into the water. They are terrible things."
He continued:
"When they start telling you things, you see that it borders on a lack of humanity. An end must be put to all this trafficking by mafias."
The emergency chief also referenced the alleged gang rape of a woman aboard a migrant vessel bound for Lanzarote, calling the sexual assault "just one of many crimes reported on board." That incident, which Spanish National Police say occurred on September 16, led to three arrests, but it appears to be only one thread in a far larger pattern of violence at sea.
Spanish National Police confirmed in a statement issued on a recent Wednesday that officers in Arrecife arrested three men, ages 21, 25, and 30, as alleged perpetrators of a gang sexual assault committed against a woman during the Atlantic crossing. The assault took place on September 16 in what authorities believe were international waters.
After the vessel docked at the port of Arrecife, the woman told rescue workers she had been sexually assaulted by multiple men during the voyage. A police spokesman said her condition was serious enough that emergency medical resources were activated immediately. She later received specialized care at police facilities.
A male witness aboard the same vessel told authorities he saw the alleged assault. All three suspects are now in custody. Police have not released their nationalities.
The jurisdictional question alone is a problem. If the assault occurred in international waters, as police believe, prosecuting the case becomes significantly more complicated. That ambiguity is a gift to traffickers, and a recurring feature of the Atlantic route, where crimes committed mid-crossing often fall into legal gray zones that no single government is eager to own.
Officials say more than 450 migrants were rescued off the coast of Lanzarote in the days surrounding these incidents. Over a dozen people are believed to have died during recent crossings, though the precise timeframe and vessels involved are not specified in available reporting.
The scale of the crisis around Spain's Canary Islands is not new. Breitbart has reported that Spanish police previously detained five men for allegedly navigating two migrant boats to the Canary Islands, with three of those men also investigated for homicide connected to passenger deaths during the crossings. In one case, a two-year-old girl from Mali died after rescue, and nine other passengers perished during the voyage, their bodies thrown overboard. The UN migration agency has estimated that nearly 23,000 people reached the Canary Islands by boat in a single recent year, with approximately 850 dying or going missing along the way.
Those numbers represent the known toll. The actual body count on the Atlantic route, where boats vanish without a trace and passengers are never counted, is almost certainly higher. A Colombian smuggler recently pleaded guilty after a boat carrying 42 people disappeared entirely, a reminder that the ocean swallows evidence as efficiently as it swallows lives.
The Lanzarote cases are not isolated. Espinosa's account of the toddler's alleged killing sits alongside other reported atrocities on the same migration corridor. In a separate incident referenced in The Sun's reporting, at least 50 migrants were allegedly tortured and thrown overboard during a crossing to Gran Canaria. Details on that case, including when it occurred and who is being held responsible, remain sparse.
In yet another case, police investigated an alleged double rape aboard a migrant boat that reached Ibiza the previous September. Two minors told authorities they were sexually assaulted by two men during a crossing from Africa. Both were taken to Can Misses Hospital for medical evaluation.
The common thread is obvious. Traffickers pack desperate people onto unseaworthy boats, charge them for the privilege, and then exercise absolute power over them during days or weeks at sea. Women and children are the most vulnerable. There is no law enforcement on the open Atlantic. There is no 911 call. There is only the trafficker's word, and, apparently, his willingness to throw a crying toddler overboard.
Maritime smuggling operations are a global problem, not limited to the African-to-European corridor. Federal agents recently intercepted 22 illegal immigrants off the Florida coast, including 13 Chinese nationals, in a rare smuggling attempt that underscored how trafficking networks exploit ocean routes wherever enforcement is thin.
Spain has struggled for years to manage the flow of migrants arriving by sea, particularly to the Canary Islands. The archipelago sits roughly 60 miles off the northwest coast of Africa, making it the closest European territory to the West African launch points favored by traffickers. Sixty thousand migrants overwhelmed Spain's Ceuta in a single day during one recent surge, illustrating how quickly the situation can spiral when borders are not secured.
Espinosa's public plea, "an end must be put to all this trafficking by mafias", carries the weight of a man who sees the consequences firsthand. Emergency workers on Lanzarote are the ones who pull survivors from the water, treat the injured, and hear the accounts of what happened during the crossing. They are not policymakers. They cannot close a border or dismantle a trafficking network. They can only describe what they see and hope someone with authority listens.
So far, the response has been limited. Three men sit in custody for the alleged gang rape. The toddler's case does not even have a confirmed police investigation. And the boats keep coming.
Governments that treat maritime enforcement as an afterthought, or that refuse to call trafficking networks what they are, share responsibility for what happens aboard those vessels. Aggressive interdiction efforts in the Western Hemisphere have shown that military and law enforcement assets can disrupt smuggling corridors when the political will exists. The question is whether European leaders will summon that will before the next child goes over the side of a boat.
A two-year-old boy is dead, allegedly killed not by the sea, but by the men his mother paid to cross it. That is what an open migration corridor, run by criminals and ignored by governments, produces.
