162 migrants dead in Egypt boat mishap
ROSETTA (AP) — The bodies of 162 people had been pulled from the waters off the Egyptian coast by Friday, two days after a boat carrying hundreds of migrants capsized in the Mediterranean while attempting to head to Europe.
Dozens more are feared dead, said Mohammed Sultan, the governor of Beheira, who provided The Associated Press with the latest figures.
He also said that the search operation is still ongoing. Many of them are believed to be children and women who were unable to swim away when the boat sank.
An AP reporter near the Nile Delta city of Rosetta saw between 20 to 30 bodies brought in by coast guards in gray inflatable boats and fishermen in wooden boats early Friday morning and delivered to ambulances at the coast guard pier.
The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, estimated that the boat was packed with some 450 people, while the state news agency MENA said earlier that the number might be as high as 600.
The boat was located nearly 12 kilometers from the Nile Delta port city of Rosetta when it sank. It had waited at sea for many hours — perhaps days — for smaller wooden boats carrying migrants to arrive from different points along the Egyptian coastline.
Survivors said that overcrowding caused the boat to capsize.
Egyptian officials said that over 160 people were rescued and that the majority are Egyptians, while the others are Sudanese and other nationalities, including Somalians and Eritreans.
The EU border agency, Frontex, recently said more than 12,000 migrants arrived in Italy from Egypt between January and September this year, compared to 7,000 in the same period last year. Yet UNHCR says that since 2014 there has been a steady increase in the number of people intercepted while trying to leave Egypt, with 4,600 people arrested this year, a 28-percent increase compared to the previous year.