A minor has died and more than 30 people have disappeared when an inflatable boat that had set sail from Cape Bojador (Sahara) with 60 people on board and was located 150 kilometers south of Gran Canaria by a Spanish rescue plane sank.
The Rabat rescue coordination center has informed Salvamento Marítimo that the Al Mansour patrol boat has rescued 24 occupants of that inflatable alive, some of them in the water, a spokesperson for the Spanish state society has informed EFE.
For its part, the Spanish Helimer 201 helicopter, sent from the Canary Islands, has recovered the body of a minor, who will be transferred to Gran Canaria.
The Caminando Fronteras collective assures that this boat had departed with 60 people, including six women and a baby.
The pneumatic was located by a Maritime Rescue plane at 7:53 p.m. on Tuesday, after a telephone call for help set off the search device, which included a request for help from any merchant ship sailing in the area.
One of them, the Navíos Azure, a container ship from the Marshall Islands en route to Algeciras (Cádiz), approached the inflatable and remained with it until it sank, the circumstances of which are unknown at the moment. The events have happened some 75 kilometers away from the Sahara coast.
Helena Maleno, spokesperson for the Caminando Fronteras collective, which warned of the departure of that boat from Cape Bojador and gave its position, had asked the Spanish authorities this morning through her Twitter account to intervene urgently because she considered it “torture”. that these people were kept for 12 hours “begging” for help that had not just arrived.
“Spain has become a Greece and so every day at the European borders”, Maleno wrote on the social network, alluding to the relinquishment of functions that some NGOs attribute to Athens in the sinking of a ship with more than 700 immigrants in the Ionian sea.
In statements to EFE, the Spanish activist has denounced that the maritime area where this tragedy occurred is part of the search and rescue zone (SAR) under Spanish responsibility, according to international law, even though Morocco claims ownership of the waters of Western Sahara.
In the search for that pneumatic, the Spanish plane found another similar boat in a nearby position, whose rescue was taken care of from Gran Canaria Salvamento Marítimo last night.
The Spanish ship returned to Arguineguín with the 63 occupants, including eleven women and a girl, from that boat and the rescue of the other boat was left in the hands of the Moroccan authorities because there was already a merchant ship next to it.
In the opinion of the spokesperson for Caminando Fronteras, Spain has committed “negligence” and an “omission of the duty of relief” because the rescue of this type of vessel “cannot be delayed, since at any moment they go down, as has been happened with this pneumatic and it is not the first time it has happened”.
