Dozens of bodies pulled from migrant ship’s hull
Swedish vessel rescues 439 from Mediterranean near Libya’s coastline
ROME— Italy’s coast guard says 51bodies have been found in the hull of a migrant boat that was rescued off Libya’s northern coast.
Coast guard Lt. Claudio Bernetti said the Swedish ship Poseiden, which is taking part in the European Union’s Triton Mediterranean operation, rescued 439 surviving migrants from the ship Wednesday.
“We had to cut up the deck of the wooden boat to get to (the bodies) in a safe way,” Swedish coast guard spokesman Mattias Lindholm said.
He said the victims probably died of asphyxiation. The corpses were placed in body bags to make sure they didn’t come into contact with the survivors.
Lindholm said the hull contained the bodies of about 40 people while the Italian coast guard estimated about 50. The coast guard said a final figure would be released later Wednesday.
The rescue was one of 10 requests for assistance that arrived at the coast guard’s operations centre as Libya-based smugglers take advantage of calm seas to send boats overloaded with migrants to Europe.
Migrants by the tens of thousands are braving the perilous journey across the Mediterranean, fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia hoping to reach Europe and be granted asylum. They pay Libyan smugglers upward of 1,000 ($1,500) to be crammed into overcrowded, unseaworthy boats for the crossing.
On land, Hungary has also become a flashpoint as Europe struggles to handle a torrent of asylum seekers heading toward more prosperous EU nations such as Germany, the Netherlands or Sweden.
By early Wednesday morning,1,302 migrants had already been detained at Hungary’s southern border with Serbia, according to Hungary’s national police chief. Police said 2,533 migrants were detained Tuesday, up from 2,093 on Monday, with the numbers setting records nearly every day.
In the Hungarian border town of Roszke, police used tear gas Wednesday to break up a brief scuffle involving about 200 migrants, mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, who were requesting asylum. Police said the migrants were growing impatient with registration delays.
A border fence, which Hungary is hastily building along the country’s 174-kilometre border with Serbia to keep the migrants out, has not proved much of a barrier. One group of migrants, including women and children, crawled under it Wednesday, using blankets, sleeping bags, jackets and a stick to raise the wire. As a police car approached, they dashed through a field.
“(It’s been) very, very difficult,” Odei, a Syrian migrant from Daraa, said once he reached Hungary. “We were here from yesterday. We are very hungry. There’s no food, there’s no medicine for the children, there’s nothing. We are so tired.”
On the Serbian side of the border, groups of migrants were camping or strolling along the fence Wednesday, looking for ways to beat it. An old blanket was thrown over it at one spot to cover the razor wire; a hole was dug under it elsewhere.
The migrants’ goal is to cross without being spotted by Hungarian border police so they will not be detained and sent to Hungarian asylum centres, where they are fingerprinted. The migrants don’t want to go through the asylum process in financially struggling Hungary.
“If I get fingerprinted in Hungary, I don’t go to Germany,” explained Abdul Majed, a 25-year-old language student from Syria.
“We make fingerprints in Germany, so you will be a refugee in Germany, not in Hungary.”
These migrants are following the Balkans route, from Turkey to Greece by sea, travelling up north to Macedonia by bus or foot and by train through Serbia, then walking the last few kilometres into Hungary, which is a member of the EU.
But in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel was booed and jeered by farright protesters Wednesday as she visited an asylum centre in the eastern town of Heidenau that was the scene of weekend riots. Merkel urged Germans to stand up against hatred and vowed zero tolerance for attacks against refugees.
“It’s shameful and repulsive what we experienced here,” Merkel said.