At least Four people have died and another five have disappeared in the wreck of the inflatable boat that sank northeast of Lanzarote this Wednesday. The boat sank with 55 sub-Saharans on board in waters under Moroccan responsibility, as reported by a spokesperson for the island’s Emergency Consortium.
Around five in the morning, local Canarian time, the Guardamar Urania, from Maritime Rescue, arrived at the port of Arrecife (Lanzarote), with 45 survivors of the shipwreck, among them a child and five women, and with three bodies, about which there are no further details.
Another survivor and a fourth corpse They had already been evacuated to Lanzarote this Wednesday by a Helimer helicopter sent by Salvamento from Gran Canaria, the first rescue vehicle to arrive in the area, located about 137 kilometers from Lanzarote.
They asked for desperate help
The information handled by Maritime Rescue indicates that the shipwreck occurred about 100 kilometers northwest of Tan Tan (Morocco), at noon or early afternoon on Wednesday. The pneumatic had left that Moroccan town the day before and since Wednesday morning its occupants they started asking for help through a satellite phone, calling both the Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras and 112 in the Canary Islands.
Initially it was because they had been left adrift, but the following calls to 112 were already desperate: they warned that they had sunk and there were several people in the water. Even in one of the calls, the alerter said that he was holding on to a drum to stay afloat, Salvamento detailed.
From the first warnings, Rabat assumed the coordination of the rescue of the pneumatic and had reported that it would send resources, but upon learning that there were people in the water, Salvamento asked for permission for the Helimer 202 helicopter to enter its area to provide help, if it arrived in time.
About twenty people clinging to the barge
It was this aircraft that located the wreckalthough initially he only found one survivor and a body, whom he picked up and transferred to Arrecife airport. Maritime Rescue then offered Morocco more resources and the two rescue helicopters available in the Canary Islands left for those waters (again the Helimer 202 and 203, the latter from Tenerife), the Sasemar 103 plane and the Guardamar Urania.
From the air, the plane confirmed shortly after that it saw some 20 or 25 people clinging to the remains of the semi-sunken inflatable, to which he launched emergency rafts to try to help them as the rescue helicopters were raising that position. A ship arrived earlier en route, which was emergency diverted and picked up the survivors until the Guardamar Urania appeared, after three hours of sailing from Lanzarote.
This Maritime Rescue vessel took care of the 45 survivors and the three recovered bodies and continued making rescues of other boats in distress in the same area.
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