Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE) waiting for a Moroccan patrol boat to arrive.
It was the Guardamar Calliope, which at the same time was rescuing another similar boat only 46 kilometers away.
At least 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 beginning. although Morocco promised to send a patrol boat, since everything happened in waters under Spanish responsibility in terms of salvage.
On her Twitter account, the spokesperson for the Caminando Fronteras collective, Helena Maleno, denounced a “new massacre.”
According to data provided to EFE by Maritime Rescue, the Guardamar Calliope rescued on 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 rescue plane had reported the location of another inflatable boat with immigrants sailing a little further south.
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 the latter had been assumed by the Rabat Rescue Coordination Center, which notified the dispatch of a patrol boat, while merchants in the area were asked by radio to come closer.
But according to the official records of the operation, since the Spanish plane located the pneumatics, until the patrol boat Al Mansour rescued the 24 survivors that remained in its remains, almost ten hours elapsed.
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 there was a merchant ship next to it and receiving communication from Morocco that it was in charge of coordinating the rescue.
On Wednesday morning, when confirming that this rescue had not taken place, another of the NGOs to help migrants that operates both on the Canary Islands Route and in the Mediterranean, the Alarm Phone, warned of the critical situation of the pneumatics and demanded to act.
Finally, yesterday afternoon, the Rabat rescue coordination center informed Maritime Rescue that the patrol boat Al Mansour had rescued 24 occupants of that inflatable alive, some of them in the water, while the Spanish helicopter Helimer 201, sent from the Canary Islands, it recovered the corpse of a child.