63 missing at sea off Libya coast

Migrants feared drowned after inflatable sinks on desperate dash to Italy A new shipwreck off the Libyan coast has left 63 people missing in the latest disaster to hit migrants seeking to cross the Mediterranean.

The group are feared drowned after the inflatable boat they were on sank, a spokesman for Libya’s navy General Ayoub Kacem said.

Kacem said that 41 people wearing life-jackets were rescued.

“The coastguards did not find bodies in the area,” he said.

According to survivors, there were 104 people on board the vessel, which sank off Garaboulli, east of Tripoli.

In addition to the 41 people rescued, a Libyan coastguard boat returned to Tripoli on Monday with another 235 migrants – including 54 infants and 29 women – rescued in two other operations in the same area.

The boat’s return to shore was delayed 24 hours due to a breakdown, Kacem said.

Including the latest shipwreck, some 170 migrants have gone missing in the Mediterranean between Friday and Sunday.

On Friday, three babies died off the coast of Libya, while 100 people remained missing in another Mediterranean shipwreck.

Just 16 were rescued, while the missing included two babies and three children under the age of 12.

More than 1 000 people have died in the Mediterranean so far this year, according to International Organisation for Migration (LOM) figures.

“There is an alarming increase in deaths at sea off Libya Coast,” said IOM Libya Chief of Mission Othman Belbeisi.

“Smugglers are exploiting the desperation of migrants to leave before there are further crackdowns on Mediterranean crossings by Europe,” he said in a statement.

IOM’s director-general, William Lacy Swing, said he was travelling to Tripoli this week to “see first-hand the conditions of migrants who have been rescued as well as those returned to shore by the Libya Coast Guard”.

Libya is a key transit point for thousands of African migrants trying to reach European shores.

When Muammar Gaddafi ran Libya, before he was overthrown and killed in 2011 during the Arab revolutions, thousands of migrants would cross Libya’s long southern border in a bid to make it to the coast and cross the Mediterranean to Europe.

The situation has deteriorated since Gaddafi’s fall, with traffickers exploiting the chaos that engulfed the country and tens of thousands of migrants seeking to make the crossing to Italy, which is 300km from the Libyan coast.