A child has died and about thirty people may have disappeared when a rubber boat sank located on Tuesday afternoon by a Spanish Maritime Rescue plane 150 kilometers south of Gran Canaria with about 60 occupants on board, whose rescue was coordinated by Morocco.

The rescue coordination center of Rabat has informed Maritime Rescue that the Al Mansour patrol boat has rescued alive 24 occupants of that pneumatic, some of them in the water, as reported by a spokesman for the Spanish state company on Wednesday.

For its part, the Spanish helicopter Helimer 201, sent from the Canary Islands, has recovered the body of a child from the shipwreck area, which has been transferred to the airport of Gran Canaria.

The collective Caminando Fronteras assures that that zodiac had left with 60 people, including six women and a minor, from Cabo Bojador.

The tire was located by a Maritime Rescue plane at 19:53 p.m. on Tuesday, after a distress phone call triggered the search device, which included the request for help to any merchant ship sailing through the area.

One of them, the Navíos Azure, a container ship from the Marshall Islands en route to Algeciras (Cádiz), approached the pneumatic and remained with it until its shipwreck, whose circumstances at the moment are unknown. The events took place about 75 kilometres away from the coast of the Sahara.

Helena Maleno, spokesperson for the collective Caminando Fronteras, which warned of the departure of that zodiac from Cabo Bojador and gave its position, had asked this morning through its Twitter account to the Spanish authorities to intervene urgently because it considered a "torture" that these people were twelve hours "begging" for help that had not just arrived.

"Spain has become a Greece and so every day on the European borders," Maleno wrote on the social network, alluding to the abandonment of functions that some NGOs attribute to Athens in the shipwreck of a ship with more than 700 immigrants in the Ionian Sea.

In statements to EFE, the Spanish activist has denounced that the maritime area where this tragedy has occurred is part of the search and rescue zone (SAR) under Spanish responsibility, according to international law, even though Morocco claims ownership of the waters of Western Sahara.

In the search for that pneumatic, the Spanish plane found another similar boat in a nearby position, whose rescue was taken over from Gran Canaria Salvamento Marítimo last night.

The Spanish ship returned to Arguineguín with the 63 occupants of that zodiac and the rescue of the other boat was left in the hands of the Moroccan authorities, because there was already a merchant at its side.

In the opinion of the spokeswoman of Caminando Fronteras, Spain has committed "negligence" and an "omission of the duty of help" because the rescue of such boats "can not be delayed, since at any time they go down, as has happened with this pneumatic and it is not the first time it happens. "

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