Fumes on boat kill dozens of migrants
• The bodies of 22 migrants — 21 of them women — arrived in Sicily Friday after they were discovered by a Doctors Without Borders ship patrolling the central Mediterranean Sea.
“It is still not entirely clear what happened, but they died a horrible death,” Jens Pagotto, who heads the organization’s mission for search-and-rescue operations, told Reuters.
He said water and fuel had likely mixed, generating fumes that “might have been enough for them to lose consciousness.”
The bodies were discovered at the bottom of one of two rubber dinghies floating off the coast of Libya Wednesday. More than 200 people, including 50 children, were rescued.
The discovery comes as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said nearly 3,000 migrants have already died this year in the Mediterranean.
It is the earliest in the four-year migration crisis that this grim benchmark has been reached, IOM spokesman Joel Millman said in Geneva. In the past it took until fall for that many lives to be lost.
The news came amid a reported spike this week in the number of migrants leaving North Africa for Europe. Italian authorities have said smugglers boost their efforts in the warmer weather and calmer waters of summer.
As of Monday, about 240,884 migrants have tried to enter Europe by sea this year, according to the IOM.
A crackdown on the safer route via Greece and Turkey across the Aegean Sea has shifted human-trafficking routes back to the perilous journey from North Africa to Italy, where there is much more sea to cross and more storms.
Libya, which has little in the way of effective central government, has been a magnet for migrants seeking a new life in Europe, especially those from the African continent.
As it becomes a major landing pad for migrants, Italy is struggling to accommodate more newcomers while it waits for the European Union to devise a cohesive relocation plan.
No such relocation plan has yet materialized. About 135,000 people have sought asylum in Italy and are awaiting a decision as to whether they can stay, travel elsewhere or be expelled.
Italian officials are also concerned that border towns, such as Ventimiglia on the Mediterranean border with France, will become holding pens for migrants desperate to travel elsewhere in Europe.
“We are doing everything to avoid a Calais-type scenario in Ventimiglia,” Mario Morcone, the Italian interior ministry’s immigration chief, told the Agence France-Presse this week.
In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, when British voters opted to bow out of the European Union, Theresa May, Britain’s new prime minister, and French President François Hollande have agreed that British border controls will remain in France, preventing a mass influx of migrants into Britain.