About 30 migrants were missing and presumed drowned after the overcrowded boat they were on capsized during a rescue attempt by a cargo ship off Libya, the Italian coast guard said on Sunday.
Seventeen migrants were saved, and a search was underway for the missing after the early-morning attempted rescue in Libya’s search-and-rescue zone, the coast guard said.
“During the rescue operations ... the boat capsized during the transfer of the migrants: 17 people were rescued and recovered by the [cargo] vessel, while approximately 30 migrants were missing,” it said.
Photo: AP
On Sunday, three more bodies were found from a Feb. 26 shipwreck just offshore the Italian peninsula, raising the known death toll in that disaster to 79 migrants, Italian state television reported.
A wooden boat that had sailed from Turkey ran into a sandbank in rough seas off a beach in Calabria, the toe of the Italian Peninsula.
That shipwreck has put Italy’s right-wing government led by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on the defensive as it tries to fend off sharp criticism that it failed to intervene in time to save the migrants.
Intelligence reports indicate that about 700,000 migrants are in Libya awaiting an opportunity to set out by sea toward Italy, an Italian lawmaker said on Sunday, but a UN migration official said the number was not credible.
The Italian secret services estimated that 685,000 migrants in Libya, many of them in detention camps, were eager to sail across the Mediterranean Sea in smugglers’ boats, Brothers of Italy party whip Tommaso Foti told television channel Tgcom24.
Stressing that the latest capsizing happened outside Italy’s area of search-and-rescue responsibility, the Italian coast guard said several other merchant vessels were looking for the boat’s missing passengers.
The humanitarian group Alarm Phone signaled to the Italian National Coordination Centers and to Libyan and Maltese authorities on Saturday that the boat with 47 people on board needed assistance.
Libyan authorities, citing “lack of naval assets availability,” contacted the Rome-based maritime aid coordination center, which sent a satellite message about an emergency to all ships in the area, the Italian coast guard said.
It said the commercial motorboat that carried the 17 survivors was headed for Italy, but would first stop in Malta to disembark two people in urgent need of medical care.
A spokesperson for the Libyan coast guard did not respond to a request for comment
Meloni is hoping an EU meeting later this month could yield solidarity from fellow leaders of EU nations in managing the large numbers of migrants and asylumseekers who come to countries on the Mediterranean’s rim, including Greece, Cyprus, Malta and Spain.
“Europe can’t look the other way,” Foti said.
While the intelligence services assessment sparked alarming headlines in Italy, the International Organization for Migration said that the figure appeared to be confusing the high end of the estimated number of migrants in Libya with those who were actually seeking to head to Europe.
“This number seems to be an estimate, that we also give, of the total presence in Libya,” International Organization for Migration spokesperson Flavio di Giacomo said.
However, of that number “only a minimum part want to leave and only a minimum part succeeds in leaving” for Europe, Di Giacomo said.
About 105,000 migrants reached Italy by sea last year.
The US and the Philippines plan to announce new sites as soon as possible for an expanded Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), which gives the Western power access to military bases in the Southeast Asian country. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr last month granted the US access to four military bases, on top of five existing locations under the 2014 EDCA, amid China’s increasing assertiveness regarding the South China Sea and Taiwan. Speaking at the Basa Air Base in Manila, one of the existing EDCA sites, US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said the defense agreements between the two countries
‘DUAL PURPOSE’: Upgrading the port is essential for the Solomon Islands’ economy and might not be military focused, but ‘it is not about bases, it is about access,’ an analyst said The Solomon Islands has awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to a Chinese state company to upgrade an international port in Honiara in a project funded by the Asian Development Bank, a Solomon Islands official said yesterday. China Civil Engineering Construction Co (CCECC) was the only company to submit a bid in the competitive tender, Solomon Islands Ministry of Infrastructure Development official Mike Qaqara said. “This will be upgrading the old international port in Honiara and two domestic wharves in the provinces,” Qaqara said. Responding to concerns that the port could be deepened for Chinese naval access, he said there would be “no expansion.” The Solomon
CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS: The US destroyer’s routine operations in the South China Sea would have ‘serious consequences,’ the defense ministry said China yesterday threatened “serious consequences” after the US Navy sailed a destroyer around the disputed Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島) in the South China Sea for the second day in a row, in a move Beijing claimed was a breach of its sovereignty and security. The warning came amid growing tensions between China and the US in the region, as Washington pushes back at Beijing’s growingly assertive posture in the South China Sea, a strategic waterway it claims virtually in its entirety. On Thursday, after the US sailed the USS Milius guided-missile destroyer near the Paracel Islands, China said its navy and
Seven stories above a shop floor hawking cheap perfume and nylon underwear, Thailand’s “shopping mall gorilla” sits alone in a cage — her home for 30 years despite a reignited row over her captivity. Activists around the world have long campaigned for the primate to be moved from Pata Zoo, on top of a Bangkok mall, with singer Cher and actor Gillian Anderson adding their voices in 2020. However, the family who owns Bua Noi — whose name translates as “little lotus” — have resisted public and government pressure to relinquish the critically endangered animal. The gorilla has lived at Pata for more