A boat carrying up to 450 migrants capsized in the Mediterranean off Egypt’s north coast on Wednesday, drowning 42 people and prompting a search operation that rescued 163 passengers, officials said.
The vessel overturned off the port city of Rosetta, police and health officials said.
Five survivors, handcuffed to beds in a Rosetta hospital room, told reporters that up to 450 people were onboard.
Photo: EPA
“The boat sunk. My three children died,” said Badr Abdel Hamid, 28, before breaking into tears.
“We were 450 people onboard. We left at 2am. An hour-and-a-half later, it capsized. Whoever knew how to swim, swam. We even abandoned the women and children,” said Ahmed Mohamed, 27.
The boat sank about 12km from the coast and those killed included one child, 10 women and 31 young men, Ali Abdel Sattar, a municipal official in the Mediterranean city, told reporters.
They were Egyptians, Eritreans, Sudanese and Syrians, Sattar said.
“I just wanted to reach Europe and live a decent life,” said Ahmed Gamal, 17.
The tragedy came months after the EU’s border agency Frontex warned that growing numbers of migrants bound for Europe were turning to Egypt as a departure point for the perilous sea journey.
Smugglers often overload the boats, some of them scarcely seaworthy, with passengers who have paid for the journey.
Egyptian Prime Minister Sharif Ismail ordered police to arrest the smugglers responsible, an Egyptian Cabinet statement said.
The Egyptian military said in a statement that 163 passengers had been rescued so far, adding that they had stopped another boat elsewhere on the Mediterranean coast carrying 294 migrants.
With the search ongoing for an unknown number of people, Egyptian Ministry of Health spokesman Khaled Megahed told reporters that hospitals were being prepared to receive more casualties.
More than 10,000 people have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean for Europe since 2014, according to the UN.
Asylum seekers have been looking for other ways to reach Europe since March, when Balkan countries closed the popular overland route and the EU agreed to a deal with Turkey to halt departures.
“Egypt is starting to become a departure country,” Frontex head Fabrice Leggeri said in an interview with the Funke group of German regional newspapers in June.
“The number of boat crossings from Egypt to Italy has reached 1,000 [so far] this year,” Leggeri said.
More than 300,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean so far this year from various points of departure, the UN said this week.
The number is down from 520,000 in the first nine months of last year.
Despite the lower numbers attempting the dangerous sea crossing, fatality rates had risen, with this year on track to be “the deadliest year on record in the Mediterranean Sea,” the UN refugee agency said (UNHCR).
Different patterns have emerged in the two European countries, Greece and Italy, which receive the vast majority of migrants.
Arrivals in Italy this year stood at 130,411, on a par with the 132,000 people who landed over the same period last year, while Greece has seen 165,750 migrants and refugees land on its shores this year, a 57 percent drop against last year’s figures, the UNHCR said.
Arrivals began falling after the deal between the EU and Turkey on curbing migrant flows across the Mediterranean.
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