Disaster for migrants
Scores are feared drowned in a pair of capsizings off the coast of Libya.
CAIRO — Once again, the Mediterranean became a mass grave. Up to 200 people were feared dead in the latest boat capsizings off the Libyan coast, international aid groups said Friday, as dozens of bodies washed ashore or were retrieved from one sunken ship’s flooded hold.
Two sinkings occurred Thursday off western Libya, officials said, the first a small craft and the second a larger vessel thought to be carrying about 400 migrants. Libya’s poorly equipped coast guard used fishermen’s boats to pluck survivors and corpses from the water overnight and into the morning.
Othman Belbeisi, the International Organization for Migration’s chief of mission for Libya, said in a statement on the IOM’s website that 100 people had been rescued, including some children. If those still unaccounted for turn out to have drowned, it would be one of the summer’s deadliest sinking episodes.
In Geneva, Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said the two boats had carried about 500 people.
“We believe 200 are still missing, feared dead,” she told journalists.
Despite the danger, the migrant tide shows no sign of abating. The UNHCR said Friday that more than 300,000 migrants and refugees had crossed the Mediterranean this year — a projected 40% jump from last year — and about 2,500 had drowned or disappeared trying.
Separately, the UNHCR reported Friday that more than 50 migrants had died on another voyage originating in Libya this week. Rescuers in Sicily found 52 bodies aboard the boat, most apparent victims of suffocation after having been locked below deck.
“It was a boat of death,” one survivor told the U.N. agency.
Sicilian prosecutors detained 10 suspected traffickers believed to have crammed the migrants into the hold, which had only 4 feet of headroom. Those arrested — seven Moroccans, two Syrians and a Libyan — are accused of using sticks and knives to beat back the victims as they sought to climb through a hatch for air.
In Thursday’s sinkings, a Red Crescent official, Ibrahim Attoushi, told Reuters that 82 bodies had been recovered. One of the sunken boats was towed back to port, the Associated Press reported, and searchers found drowned people when they broke through the deck to its flooded hold.
The boats capsized off the western town of Zuwara, heavily used by human smugglers as a launching point for voyages. Libyan state authority has all but collapsed as rival armed groups fight for territory and oil wealth, and human trafficking goes largely unchecked. Boats used by smugglers are usually rickety and overcrowded.
For those who were rescued and turned over to Libyan authorities, the failed voyage may usher in a harsh new chapter. Capsizing close to the Libyan coast generally results in migrants being taken to dirty, hot, crowded detention centers, where they can be held for long periods without adequate food or medical care.
The latest victims at sea were thought to include subSaharan Africans too poor to find another route to Europe rather than passing through lawless Libya.
This summer has seen a massive shift in migration via the land route through Greece and the western Balkans to wealthy northern European countries such as Germany; much of that surge is made up of asylumseekers from Syria and Afghanistan.
The perils of overland travel were underlined Thursday with the discovery in Austria of a refrigerated truck that contained the decomposing remains of 71 people who apparently were being transported by smugglers.