A Spanish fishing trawler sank in rough waters off eastern Canada on Tuesday, killing at least four of the vessel’s 22-strong crew, the Spanish transport ministry said. Rescuers saved three crew members and were searching for 15 others who were missing off the island of Newfoundland on Canada’s Atlantic coast where the ship foundered, a ministry spokesman told AFP. Twelve of the crew are Spanish nationals, eight are from Peru and the rest from Ghana, Spanish media reports said. Rescuers had spotted four of the trawler’s lifeboats, said Maica Larriba, a representative of Spain’s central government in the northwestern Galicia region where the trawler is based. “Two were completely empty and in one of them were just three survivors who were in a state of hypothermic shock because the temperature of the water is horrible, very low,” she told public radio. Rescuers had not yet managed to reach the fourth lifeboat, she added. When the trawler sent out a distress signal, two other fishing vessels in the area came to its aid, Rosa Quintana, the Galician official in charge of maritime affairs, told reporters. A Canadian coastguard helicopter airlifted the three survivors to safety, she added. The fishing vessel, a freezer trawler registered in 2004, was based in the port of Marin in Galicia and belongs to shipowner Manuel Nores. The company, founded in 1950, has eight freezer trawlers and some 300 employees, according to its web site.It has fishing vessels operating in the South Atlantic, off the Canadian coast and between Mauritania and Guinea-Bissau. “We are following with concern the search and rescue operation for the crew of the Galician ship that sunk in the waters of Newfoundland,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez tweeted. “All my love to their families. The government remains in constant contact with rescue services,” he added.