Several dead after Spanish trawler sinks off Canada | News

The Spanish fishing vessel with a crew of 24 sank near the eastern coast of Canada, according to media reports.

A Spanish fishing trawler sank off Canada’s east coast overnight on Monday, killing four people and leaving 15 missing, Spain’s transport ministry said.

Rescuers saved three crew members and were continuing to search the area off Newfoundland on Canada’s Atlantic coast where the ship sank, a spokesman for the ministry told the AFP news agency.

The Spanish daily El Pais said the Spanish fishing vessel, named the Villa del Pitanxo, had a crew of 24, including 12 Spaniards, two Ghanaians and several Peruvians.

Maica Larriba, the central government representative in Pontevedra in the northwestern region of Galicia where the owners of the trawler is based, told public radio rescuers had sighted four of the vessel’s life rafts. They had been able to get to three and were still trying to reach the fourth.

“We have been informed that … bodies have been found,” she added.

“Two were completely empty and in one of them were just three survivors in a state of hypothermic shock because the temperature of the water is terrible, very low,” she said.

“We have been told there are bodies.”

The government was in coordination and permanent contact with local rescue services, its spokesperson, Isabel Rodriguez, told a news conference.

Nores Marin, the owner of the stricken vessel, declined to comment. Refinitiv data showed the Villa del Pitanxo left the Galician port of Vigo on January 26.

Based in the city of Pontevedra in the northwestern region of Galicia, the Nores Group has fishing vessels operating in the South Atlantic, off the Canadian coast and between Mauritania and Guinea-Bissau.

The company, founded in 1950, has eight freezer trawlers and some 300 employees, according to its website.