MIGRANTS FALL INTO THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA DURING A RESCUE OPERATION OFF THE LIBYAN COAST. THE TOLL OF DEAD AND MISSING HIT 4,220 THURSDAY, MAKING THIS THE DEADLIEST YEAR ON RECORD IN THE MEDITERRANEAN.
• At least 239 migrants are believed to have drowned in two shipwrecks off the coast of Libya, the UN refugee agency said Thursday, adding to the toll in what was already the deadliest year on record in the Mediterranean Sea.
Survivor accounts suggest that two crowded boats broke up just off the coast of Libya on Wednesday, UN refugee agency spokeswoman Carlotta Sami said. The 31 survivors were taken early Thursday to the Italian island of Lampedusa, which has become a rescue hub amid an ever-deadlier crisis as migrants depart Africa’s northern shores in a bid to make it to Europe.
The reports from the survivors could not be independently confirmed, but it is common for migrant ships to be filled far beyond capacity, and hundreds have perished in past sinkings. If true, the latest shipwrecks bring the toll of dead and missing in the Mediterranean to 4,220 this year, the highest on record, Sami said.
“This is an absolutely appalling figure,” she said.
The first dinghy — carrying around 140 people, including six children and about 20 women, some pregnant — sank when wooden planks laid at the bottom broke, causing it to capsize 40 kilometres off the Libyan coast, the UN said. Twenty-nine people were rescued, and 12 bodies were recovered.
In a separate operation, two women found swimming at sea told rescuers that 128 other people had died in their wreck.
Most of the migrants appear to have come from sub-Saharan Africa, Sami said, but she said the details were still being checked.
She did not immediately know which agency had carried out the rescue.
UN High Commissi oner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said he was “deeply saddened by another tragedy on the high seas.”
Migrant traffic across the Mediterranean has changed significantly in the last year, after more than 1 million people made the passage in 2015. Most of them came via Turkey to Greece and then pressed onward into Europe. The sea portion of that journey was shorter and safer than the perilous passage from Libya to Italy. But the Turkish government largely shut down the migrant flow in the spring, closing off the main pathway for people fleeing the conflicts in Syria and Iraq into Europe.