A coastguard spokesperson said: “About 20 or 22 are missing according to an NGO which gave notice of a vessel that had left with 49 migrants from Morocco.”
A passenger ship found the boat on Wednesday afternoon, rescuing 27 people, including six who had to be evacuated by helicopter for medical care.
Helana Maleno, a member of the pro-migrant NGO Caminando Fronteras (Walking Borders), said on Twitter that the missing passengers were most likely dead.
She tweeted: “Today, 22 people drowned. They were on the boat for which we raised the alert yesterday. They died because no one took the trouble to rescue them.”
The Spanish coastguard insisted that it would help Morocco search for the missing 22 migrants, although the rescuers said they had not “seen anyone in the water”.
Around 20 are feared to have drowned in the Mediterranean (Image: Getty)
This is the second such incident in a week. Last Wednesday, Spain’s coastguard saved 49 migrants from an overcrowded boat that had been stranded in the Mediterranean for nearly two days.
Some 569 migrants have died or gone missing attempting to cross the Mediterranean sea into Europe since January, 173 of them while
