British child dies after being rescued from swimming pool in Canary Islands

11-year-old was resuscitated but suffered serious neurological consequences that proved fatal

A British girl, aged 11, has died after nearly drowning in a swimming pool while on holiday with her family in the Canary Islands.

They were staying at a holiday complex in Morro Jable, Fuerteventura, where she was pulled unconscious from the water, in an area where it was just 30 centimetres deep, by a lifeguard at about 11.30am on Thursday.

The lifeguard found that she had swallowed a lot of water and her heart had stopped, but he managed to resuscitate her.

Once she had been stabilised, she was taken to the General hospital in Fuerteventura, but her condition became so serious that she was evacuated to the Materno Infantil hospital in Gran Canaria.

Sadly, the girl died there on Friday from the serious neurological consequences of almost drowning.

Hospital medics were unable to treat her after she suffered irreversible brain death, according to the association Canarias 1.500 kilómetros de Costa (Canary Islands 1,500km of coastline), which works to try and stop tragedies like this one.

She is the fourth child to die by drowning in the Canary Islands so far this year, the most over the same period for at least a decade, and 17 children have drowned in pools across Spain this year.

Initial press reports mistakenly gave the British girl's age as 5 but Spanish police later confirmed that she had been 11.

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