Sharjah24 - AFP: Rescue teams off eastern Canada ended a search Wednesday for survivors from a sunken Spanish fishing trawler with only three of the boat's 24-person crew pulled out alive.

Spain was in mourning over the accident, which its agriculture and fisheries minister, Luis Planas, said was "the worst tragedy we've had in the fishing sector in 38 years".

Rescuers had been searching for 12 victims, with nine already confirmed dead and three others plucked alive from the Atlantic Ocean after the trawler sank in bad weather.

"The search for the 12 missing fishers aboard the FV Villa de Pitanxo has been suspended," Brian Owens of the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre (JRCC) in Halifax, Canada told AFP.

The mission was called off following an "exhaustive" search lasting more than 36 hours and covering 900 nautical square miles (3,080 nautical square kilometres), he said.

After initially indicating that 10 bodies had been recovered, on Wednesday Canadian officials corrected the death toll to nine.

The last time Spain suffered a major fishing disaster was in July 1984 when a sardine boat called the Islamar III sank off the Canary Islands, claiming 26 lives.

"This is a job which not only is very hard but is also very dangerous," Planas added.

In Madrid, lawmakers observed a minute of silence in parliament for the dead and the missing from the trawler, which went down some 250 nautical miles east of Newfoundland.

Of the 24 crew members, 16 are Spanish, five Peruvians and three Ghanaians.