A Spanish fishing boat sank in darkness and rough seas off Newfoundland in eastern Canada on Tuesday, killing at least seven people, a Spanish official said. Three crew members were rescued from a lifeboat and 14 others are wanted.

The 50-metre (164ft) long vessel, called Villa de Pitanxo and operating from the Spanish region of Galicia, sank around 0600 GMT, regional government representative Maica Larriba told Spanish public radio. .

Salvamento Marítimo de España said the 24-member crew included 16 Spaniards, five Peruvians and three Ghanaians.

The head of the regional government of Galicia, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said the Spanish ambassador to Canada told him that seven bodies had been found. “The situation at sea was very bad,” Núñez Feijóo told reporters.

Among the survivors are the captain of the boat, 53, and his nephew, 42, according to the newspaper La Voz de Galicia. Both men contacted their families by phone, the newspaper reported.

The signal from the ship’s data-logging system, which is used to track vessels, stopped transmitting around 0600 GMT, Larriba told Spanish public broadcaster RTVE.

A rescue center in Halifax, Nova Scotia, operated by the Canadian Air Force and Coast Guard, dispatched a helicopter, a Hercules aircraft and a rescue vessel to the area, 450 kilometers (280 miles) from the island of Newfoundland. .

“The fishing boat has not been found,” the rescue center wrote on Twitter. “The search for the rest of the crew continues and we hope they are found,” he added.

A nearby Spanish fishing boat was the first to arrive in the area and found the three survivors and four dead in one of the fishing boat’s four lifeboats, authorities said. Two of the lifeboats were empty and the fourth is believed to have disappeared.

Salvamento Marítimo, in Madrid, received the first alert from the Villa de Pitanxo beacon and coordinated the rapid response with the Halifax rescue center, a spokeswoman for the service said.

The ship’s owner, Grupo Nores, did not immediately respond to calls or written questions seeking information. According to its website, the group operates fishing fleets in the waters of Argentina, Canada, Morocco, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and the North Sea.

The news was a terrible blow for the port town of Marín in northwestern Galicia, where many live off the sea. Mayor María Ramallo said the sinking was the biggest tragedy on record in the community.

“It’s a tragedy of a magnitude we didn’t remember,” Ramallo was quoted as saying by Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

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Barry Hatton in Lisbon, Portugal, contributed to this report