Six people have died aboard an inflatable boat located at midnight last night in the south of Tenerife, after being lost at sea for nine days, according to a report from the 23 survivors to the Red Cross when they arrived in Los Cristianos aboard a Maritime Rescue boat.
The boat was intercepted at around midnight in an emergency operation in which a helicopter and two Maritime Rescue boats participated, the Salvamar Alpheratz, based in Tenerife, and the Salvamar Alborán, usually stationed in La Gomera, which was the one that finally drove its occupants to Los Cristianos.
When Maritime Rescue met the small boat, 37kms southwest of Tenerife, there were 23 people on board in good health, 14 adult men, five women, and four minors, all of them of sub-Saharan origin, who all received medical attention.
The spokesperson for the Red Cross team that met them at the port this morning, Lourdes Hernández, said: "For now we don’t have much information, except that they are saying that six people died during the nine-day journey at sea, four men and two women, after leaving a point on the coast located north of the city of Dakhla just south of the Sahara with 29 people on board.”
