After the sinking of a dinghy located this Tuesday afternoon by a Spanish Maritime Rescue plane 150 kilometers south of Gran Canaria, a child has died and about thirty people may have disappeared. With about 60 occupants on board, including six women and a minor, from Cabo Bojador, whose rescue was coordinated by Morocco.
The Rabat rescue coordination center has informed Maritime Rescue that the patrol boat Al Mansour has rescued 24 occupants of that dinghy alive, some of them in the water, as reported to EFE by a spokesman for the Spanish state-owned company.
For the moment, the circumstances of the shipwreck are unknown. The events have occurred about 75 kilometers away from the coast of the Sahara.
Helena Maleno, spokeswoman for the Caminando Fronteras collective, who alerted of the departure of that zodiac from Cabo Bojador and gave its position, had asked this morning through her Twitter account to the Spanish authorities to intervene urgently because she considered it a "torture" to have those people twelve hours "begging" for help that never arrived.
"Spain has become a Greece and so every day on the European borders", Maleno wrote on the social network, in allusion to the dereliction of duties that some NGOs attribute to Athens in the shipwreck of a boat with more than 700 immigrants in the Ionian Sea.
In the opinion of the spokeswoman for Caminando Fronteras, Spain has committed "negligence" and a "omission of the duty of rescue" because the rescue of this type of boats "cannot be delayed, since at any moment they go down, as has happened with this dinghy and it is not the first time it happens".