184 refugees feared dead after crowded boat capsizes off Libya
Survivors tell how vessel slowly sank after engine cut out
ROME // Four people died and nearly 180 are missing, presumed dead, after a wooden boat carrying refugees capsized in the Mediterranean, officials said yesterday. Humanitarian workers from the International Organisation for Migration ( IOM) and the UN refugee agency ( UNHCR) recounted harrowing details of the latest tragedy in waters off Libya after talking to four rescued passengers, two Eritreans and two Ethiopians, who arrived in Sicily on Monday after Saturday’s shipwreck.
The survivors, three men and one woman, were described as “traumatised and exhausted”.
They said their two-deck boat had left Libya on Friday with more than 180 people packed on board, all of them originally from East Africa.
After five hours at sea, the engine cut out and the boat started to take on water. As it slowly sank, more and more of the people on board were submerged.
One of the survivors described his desperate effort to find his wife, who had taken a spot in the centre of the ship.
After hours in the water, the survivors were rescued on Saturday, 30 nautical miles from the Libyan coast, by a French boat operating as part of the European borders agency’s Operation Triton, and taken to the Sicilian port of Trapani on Monday.
The latest deaths follow a record year for the number of refugees trying to reach Europe on the western Mediterranean route from North Africa to Italy. About 181,000 people were registered at Italian ports last year, while the UNHCR recorded more than 5,000 deaths and presumed deaths on all refugee routes across the Mediterranean.