The UN refugee agency on Wednesday said that 500 people might have died in the choppy waters of the Mediterranean last week, when a large boat packed with refugees and migrants from Africa and the Middle East capsized in an unknown location between Libya and Italy.
If confirmed, it would be the worst humanitarian calamity in Europe’s refugee and migrant crisis since more than 800 people died in April last year near Libyan shores as they tried to reach Italy.
The agency based its findings on interviews with 41 survivors of the shipwreck, although it was not able to verify the episode independently.
Photo: AFP
The refugees and migrants — 23 Somalis, 11 Ethiopians, six Egyptians and a Sudanese — were picked up by a merchant ship near Greece on Saturday last week after days of drifting at sea. They were transferred to a migrant camp in Kalamata, a city on the Greek mainland.
UNRESOLVED
Their stories helped lift a cloud of confusion about the episode ever since rumors of the sinking emerged over the weekend. However, they did not resolve the questions of where the ship went down or what the ultimate death toll might be.
No national coast guards have reported finding the boat.
A deal that went into effect on March 20 to deport migrants reaching Greece from Turkey has reduced the number of people coming over the Aegean, a perilous voyage that killed about 800 last year.
However, the policy appears to have prompted smugglers to return to previously abandoned dangerous routes through Libya to Italy — the same path used by the 800 migrants who drowned in an overloaded boat a year ago.
According to the survivors in Kalamata, a similar situation unfolded late last week, although the exact date was not clear, said William Spindler, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
MOTHER SHIP
Smugglers had arranged for a so-called mother ship to leave the Libyan coast and head toward Italy, loaded with “hundreds of people in terribly overcrowded conditions.”
Soon afterward, a second boat about 30m long set off from near Tobruk, Libya, with between 100 and 200 people aboard. After several hours, it neared the larger ship, which was waiting somewhere off shore.
The smugglers began unloading migrants from the smaller boat onto the larger ship, the survivors told UN workers.
As people boarded the big boat, it began to list. Then it capsized, spilling passengers into the sea, where most of them drowned amid a panicked frenzy.
The survivors included people who had not yet left the smaller vessel and a handful who managed to swim to it as the larger ship went down.
“I could see the bigger boat sinking,” Liban Qadar Jama, a native of Somaliland, was quoted as telling the Voice of America’s Somali Service this week. “We ran with the small boat we were in, as some migrants from the sunk boat desperately swam toward us. We could only save four of them.”
In a statement, the refugee agency called for “increased regular pathways for the admission of refugees and asylum seekers to Europe” to “reduce the demand for people-smuggling and dangerous irregular sea journeys.”
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