As many as 700 people were feared dead after a fishing boat packed with migrants capsized off the Libyan coast, in what might be one of the worst disasters of the Mediterranean migrant crisis, officials said yesterday.
Twenty eight people had been rescued in the incident, which happened just off Libyan waters, south of the southern Italian island of Lampedusa, Antonino Irato, a senior official from the Italian border police, told television station RaiNews24.
He said 24 bodies had been recovered.
If confirmed, the death toll would bring the total number of dead since the beginning of the year to more than 1,500.
Italian officials said navy and coast guard vessels, as well as merchant ships in the area and a Maltese patrol boat, were involved in the search-and-rescue operation, which was being coordinated by the Italian coast guard in Rome.
“They are literally trying to find people alive among the dead floating in the water,” Irato said.
There was still no decision on where the survivors and the bodies that had been recovered would be taken.
The boat is believed to have capsized when the migrants shifted to one side of the overcrowded vessel as a merchant ship approached.
“The first details came from one of the survivors who spoke English and who said that at least 700 people, if not more, were on board. The boat capsized because people moved to one side when another vessel that they hoped would rescue them approached,” said Carlotta Sami, a spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
The new deaths fueled calls for a stronger response from Europe to the increasingly deadly migrant crisis playing out in the Mediterranean. International aid groups and Italian authorities have criticized Europe’s so-called “Triton” border protection operation, which recently replaced a more comprehensive Italian search-and-rescue mission.
“A tragedy is unfolding in the Mediterranean, and if the EU and the world continue to close their eyes, it will be judged in the harshest terms as it was judged in the past when it closed its eyes to genocides when the comfortable did nothing,” Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said.
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said Europe was witnessing “systematic slaughter in the Mediterranean.”
“How can we remain insensible when we’re witnessing entire populations dying at a time when modern means of communications allow us to be aware of everything?” Renzi said at a political event in Mantua.
On his way back to Rome, where he was expected to give a news conference later, Renzi spoke by telephone to French President Francois Hollande.
About 20,000 migrants have reached the Italian coast this year, the International Organization for Migration has estimated. That is fewer than in the first four months of last year, but the number of deaths has risen almost nine-fold.
Triton has been criticized by humanitarian groups and Italy as inadequate to tackle the scale of the problem.
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