One child dead, 30 migrants missing after dinghy sinks off Canary islands
Las Palmas, Spain, Jun 21 (EFE).- One child died and around 30 migrants were feared missing after an inflatable boat sank in the Atlantic Ocean near the Spanish Canary Islands, a Spanish Maritime Rescue spokesman told EFE on Wednesday.
The boat was located Tuesday by a coast guard plane 150 kilometers south of the island of Gran Canaria with about 60 occupants on board.
The rescue was coordinated by Morocco, the coast guard said, with the rescue coordination center in Rabat informing Spanish officials that a Moroccan patrol boat had rescued 24 of the dinghy’s occupants alive.
A Spanish helicopter recovered the body of a child from the area where the boat sank.
The inflatable was located by the Spanish plane on Tuesday evening after a distress call.
The Navios Azure, a Marshall Islands container ship, approached the dinghy and remained alongside it until it sank, the circumstances of which are still unclear.
During the search for the dinghy, the Spanish plane had found another similar boat nearby, whose 63 occupants were rescued by the Spanish coast guard.
The incident comes about a week after a migrant boat sank in the Ionian Sea off the coast of Greece with as many as 700 people on board, in which nearly 80 people died, about 100 were rescued and hundreds remain missing. EFE
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