By Miranda Leitsinger
Associated Press
Friday, June 2, 2006

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, June 1 -- They left Africa on Christmas Eve seeking a better life in Europe. Instead, the migrants' rusty boat carried them to their deaths as it drifted across 2,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean, winding up near the Caribbean island of Barbados.

By the time a fisherman found the boat on April 30, the bodies of 11 young men aboard were virtually mummified by the sun and salt spray. One had written a farewell note before dying.

"I would like to send to my family in Bassada [Senegal] a sum of money. Please excuse me and goodbye," read the note, found tucked between bodies.

It looked like the work of a Senegalese man named Diao Souncar Dieme and contained contact numbers for his brother and for his best friend, Barbados Attorney General Dale Marshall said Wednesday.

With transit routes to Europe through Morocco gradually being sealed, migrants are taking to the seas farther down the coast of northwest Africa, some traveling more than 1,000 miles in stages in overcrowded fishing boats to reach Europe. The boats often get lost or break down, drifting helplessly in the Atlantic or capsizing in rough seas.

The boat apparently left Senegal, on Africa's west coast, with 52 people aboard, Marshall said. Twenty feet long and capped with a small wheelhouse, it was probably bound for Spain's Canary Islands, a gateway to Europe located in the Atlantic about 200 miles off Morocco's southern coast.

"This is the end of my life in this big Moroccan sea," the disoriented passenger wrote.

Police found currency in euros, a travel itinerary and an airline ticket from Senegal Airways in the boat.

Spanish police have asked Interpol, the international police organization, to help find a Spaniard in the Canary Islands who allegedly organized the ill-fated trip and charged the would-be migrants between $1,540 and $1,930 each, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported Sunday.

A Barbados funeral home is holding the 11 bodies. "The issue is really trying to identify who these individuals are," Marshall said.

An Interpol team has examined the boat and the bodies, and a second team has been requested.