
New deaths in Mediterranean migrant crisis
At least 37 people drowned off Libya’s coast in the second such fatal accident in days
A boat carrying migrants sank off Libya’s Mediterranean coast, killing at least 37 people, a local official said on Sunday, the second such fatal accident within days.
“We had reports this morning that there are seven bodies of illegal migrants that sank off Khoms (east of Tripoli)...but we don’t have any details how many migrants were on board,” said Mohamad al-Misrati, a spokesman for the Red Crescent in Tripoli.
Fishermen later discovered 30 more bodies in the same area near Khoms, a town some 100 km east of the capital, he said. Volunteers of the Red Crescent were trying to recover the dead but were lacking boats.
No more details were immediately available.
On Thursday, a vessel packed with migrants hoping to make it from Libya to Italy sank in waters off the Libyan town of Zuwara, killing up to 200 people.
Lawless Libya has turned into a major transit route for migrants fleeing conflict and poverty by boat to Europe.
Smugglers exploit the country’s chaos to bring Syrians into Libya via Egypt or nationals of sub-Saharan countries via Niger, Sudan and Chad.
Mediterranean crisis
The migrants pay thousands of dollars for the land and sea passage with smugglers often beating and torturing them to press for more money for the final leg of the trip by sea in unseaworthy vessels, rights groups say.
Libya has asked the European Union for help to train and equip its navy which was largely destroyed during the uprising in 2011 that toppled Muammar Qaddafi.
But all training and cooperation was frozen in 2014 as the EU boycotted a self-declared government controlling western Libya, which seized the capital Tripoli a year ago by expelling the official premier to the east.
The number of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe has passed 300,000 this year, up from 219,000 in the whole of 2014, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said on Friday.
More than 2,500 people have died making the crossing this year, not including those feared drowned off Libya in the last 24 hours, it said. That compares with 3,500 who died or went missing in the Mediterranean in 2014.
Also Read
-
Mediterranean migrant crossings top 300,000 in 2015
-
Children found in Austria migrant truck hospitalized
-
‘I stopped counting’: doctor on discovering migrant boat dead
-
Hungary says anti-migrant barrier along Serb border complete
-
Libya recovers 105 bodies as migrant boat sinks
-
More than 70 dead in Austrian migrant truck tragedy
-
Lorry of migrant corpses intensifies Europe’s crisis
-
Refugee wave into hotspot Hungary hits new record high