An immigrant boat with 47 young male passengers on board, including two who claim to be underage, was towed into port in Arrecife, Lanzarote

An immigrant boat with 47 young male passengers on board, including two who claim to be underage, was towed into port in Arrecife, Lanzarote, on Wednesday after the boat was spotted some 50 miles to the east of island after three days adrift.

The migrants said they were Sahrawi, and some were seen holding up Western Sahara flags and shouting out ‘Viva el Sahara!’ and ‘Viva el Polisario!’ as they came into port.

The Coastguard were mobilised for their rescue after a fishing boat reported hearing over the radio a call from a merchant ship that it had spotted the migrants’ boat.

A spokesman for the local Sahrawi community on Lanzarote told the EFE news agency that they had been alerted from Laayoune that young members of the Sahrawi movement could be travelling on the boat. Bachir Mansur said the boat’s arrival in the Canaries could be a tactic by the Moroccan government to remove rebellious Sahrawis from their territory by providing them with boats to leave Western Sahara.

Stepfather of 18 year old Yulisa Antonia Pérez re-arrested and charged with her murder

stepfather of 18 year old Yulisa Antonia Pérez from the Dominican Republic, whose corpse was found on a rubbish tip near Arrecife (Lanzarote) at the end of last year, five days after she was reported missing, has been re-arrested and charged with her murder. The suspect was first taken into protective custody on the day Yulisa's body was found after being accused of her murder by some within the local Dominican community, who were threatening to lynch him. Yulisa's partially-buried body was found by a local man out walking his dog on November 13th and the autopsy revealed that she died of ashpyxiation. However, apart from having her hands tied behind her back, there were no other signs of violence, and she had not been raped. It seems that Yulisa's mother, Irma had moved in with the suspect around six months before Yulisa was killed. The family lived in the Los Geranios district of the island's capital.