Six Spaniards who survived the sinking of the fishing boat Argos Georgia last Monday in the Falkland Islands landed in Santiago de Compostela on Sunday around one in the afternoon. The sinking of the boat cost the lives of nine people, including two Spaniards. Four other sailors are still missing, two of them Galicians: Juan Antonio García Rey, a machine replacement, and Antonio Barreiro, from the town of Noia in A Coruña. An Airbus A330 from the 45 Air Forces Group of the Spanish Air Force chartered by the Government to repatriate the crew members of the fishing boat landed at the Santiago Military Airport around 1:00 pm. Four of the Spanish surviving sailors disembarked, one of whom was attended to by members of the Medical Aeroevacuation Unit. Around three in the afternoon, the aircraft took off for Torrejón Air Base (Madrid) with the other two Spanish scientific observers and seven foreign sailors of different nationalities who also survived the shipwreck. They were accompanied by a diplomat from the Consular Emergency Division. The repatriation is the result of an operation coordinated by the ministries of Foreign Affairs, Transport, Agriculture and Fisheries, and Defense.
At the Santiago de Compostela military airport, next to the Rosalía de Castro Airport, the relatives of the survivors were waiting this morning. The reunion took place inside the facilities, where the media could not access. The Government delegate in Galicia, Pedro Blanco; the President of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda; the Minister of the Sea, Alfonso Villares; and the Mayor of Ribeira, Luis Pérez, also traveled to the military airport. The bodies of the two Spaniards who died in the shipwreck—César Acevedo, from Vigo, the fishing boat’s captain, and Santiago Leyenda, from Baiona (Pontevedra), the cook on the boat—have not yet been repatriated due to the protocols of the British authorities, who plan to transfer them to Oxfordshire for autopsies. As for the four missing at sea (two of them Spaniards), the search and rescue operation is ongoing, with a ship, a fishing boat, and an airplane participating. The waves in the area reach eight meters high and winds blow at 35 knots. The crew of the sunken longliner consisted of ten Spaniards, eight Russians, five Indonesians, two Uruguayans, and two Peruvians.
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, celebrated the return of the survivors with a message on his official X account and thanked the medical team and the staff of the Ministry of Defense for their “extraordinary work” in bringing them “back home.” The President of the Xunta also shared the news on his social media saying, “All our support and affection for the families of the victims of the Argos Georgia shipwreck. We celebrate your arrival,” Rueda wrote.
