Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE) waiting for a Moroccan patrol boat to arrive.
It was the Guardamar Calliope, which at the same time they were located was rescuing another similar boat just 46 kilometers away.
The result is that 34 people have disappeared and two have died this Wednesday in the Atlantic, 162 kilometers south of Gran Canaria, in this new tragedy after which several NGOs have wondered why Spain did not take charge of the rescue from the start, even though Morocco promised to send a patrol boat, since everything happened in waters under Spanish responsibility in terms of salvage.
According to data provided to EFE by Salvamento Marítimo, the Guardamar Calliope rescued this Tuesday, around 8:30 p.m., 63 people who were sailing in an inflatable boat at the coordinates 27º 23.3′ North 14º 45.3′ West. In other words, at a point in the Atlantic located 100 kilometers from its base in Arguineguín (Gran Canaria) and about 140 kilometers from both El Aaiún and Cape Bojador (Sahara).
Half an hour earlier, a Salvage plane had reported the location of another inflatable boat with immigrants sailing a little further south, at coordinates 26º 59.4′ N and 14º 36′ W. In distance: 137 km from Arguineguín, 118 km from El Aaiún and 97 km from Cape Bojador.
With the first service completed, the Guardamar Calliope headed back to Gran Canaria and did not continue towards the second zodiac, because the rescue of this had been assumed by the Rabat Rescue Coordination Center, which notified that it was sending a patrol boat, while it was He radioed merchants in the area to come closer.
If the coordinates of the two inflatables are compared in a geographic navigator, it is verified that the Calliope was a short distance from the inflatable that ultimately sank: about 46 kilometers, or 25 nautical miles, equivalent to one hour of navigation at the speed rescue of a Guardamar (about 25 knots, 46 km/h).
From the time the Spanish plane located the southernmost inflatable, at 7:53 p.m. on Tuesday (Canary Islands time), until the Al Mansour patrol boat rescued the 24 survivors who remained in its wreckage, at 6:20 p.m. on Wednesday, almost ten hours passed. wait, always according to the official records of the operation.
Ten hours in which the 60 people on board waited for help to arrive, while the Navíos Azure followed by their side, a 260-meter-long container ship headed for Algeciras (a ship too large to attempt a rescue because of its account; in fact, Maritime Rescue usually instructs captains in these cases not to intervene except in a total emergency situation).
The Spanish authorities considered the situation of that pneumatics under control when verifying that this merchantman from the Marshall Islands was there and also receiving communication from Morocco that it was in charge of coordinating the rescue and was sending a patrol boat, which explains that Guardamar Calliope did not continue sailing south to meet him, but returned to the Arguineguín wharf.
This morning, the Caminando Fronteras collective, which had launched the alerts for the departure of the two inflatable boats from Cape Bojador and had provided approximate coordinates for the second, called on Spain to intervene, because there was no news that the Navy patrol boat had arrived. promised by Rabat.
“It is torture to have 60 people, including six women and a baby, waiting for more than 12 hours for a rescue in a flimsy inflatable that can sink,” his spokesperson, Helena Maleno, wrote on Twitter, recalling that these waters are within the rescue zone (SAR) assigned to Spain by international law.
Upon learning of what happened, Maleno accused Spain of having committed “negligence” and an “omission of the duty of relief.” “Spain has become a Greece”, she summed up indignantly, in an allusion to the abandonment of functions that some NGOs attribute to Athens in the shipwreck of a ship with about 700 immigrants in the Ionian Sea.
Another of the NGOs to help migrants that operates both on the Canary Islands Route and in the Mediterranean, the Alarm Phone, spoke in the same terms, also on Twitter: “Why didn’t anyone intervene before?” EFE