The Borneo Post (Sabah)

Another 100 migrants feared drowned in Mediterran­ean

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ROME: The toll of missing and dead rose Thursday in a grim week of Mediterran­ean crossings as African survivors described being robbed of life jackets and boat engines and abandoned to a watery grave.

A group of 27 survivors, all men, were plucked to safety on Wednesday, but roughly 100 other passengers who set off with them from Libya were missing and feared drowned, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said.

Along with two other shipwrecks this week, the latest incident pushed the toll to 18 confirmed dead and 340 missing, in what was already the most lethal year ever recorded for migrant deaths at sea.

The survivors rescued Wednesday by a British Navy ship, described being stripped of their sole means of survival by the men they had paid for safe passage.

They had set off before dawn on Monday from a beach close to Tripoli. After several hours the trafficker­s, travelling aboard a separate boat, ordered them at gunpoint to hand over life jackets they had paid for, as well as the boat engine, and left them without a satellite phone to call for help.

“At that point I thought we were going to die”, said Abdoullae Diallo, 18, according to MSF. “Without a motor, we couldn’t go far. A trafficker told us we would be rescued but I felt like we were going to die.”

The overcrowde­d dinghy began rapidly taking on water and deflated. Tossed for two days and nights on rough seas, some passengers fell overboard, while others succumbed to exhaustion.

By the time the British Royal Navy’s HMS Enterprise — engaged in the anti-traffickin­g Sofia operation — found them, just 27 people were left alive, clinging to what was left of the dinghy.

“They are exhausted, shocked and traumatise­d,” MSF coordinato­r Michele Delaro told AFP by satellite telephone from the Bourbon Argos rescue ship.

The survivors, who hail from Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Senegal and Sierra Leone, along with eight bodies retrieved from the dinghy were transferre­d to the MSF ship, which had just returned to the area after disembarki­ng nearly 800 other migrants on the Italian island of Sicily.

The week’s succession of tragedies at sea started with the recovery of just 15 of 150 people aboard one rickety dinghy on Monday. On Tuesday 23 were found on another boat that initially had 122 aboard.

The first group of survivors were brought to Catania, in Sicily, while the second group were expected to arrive on Italy’s mainland in the port of Reggio Calabria. Some were children.

“One young boy has been weeping, asking for his mother,” Mathilde Auvillain, a spokeswoma­n for SOS Mediterran­ee told AFP.

“Another has written a list of names of the people travelling with him and re-reads it over and over. He wants to know if his friends are on the boat or in the sea,” she said.

Boatpeople policy tarnishes Australia rights record — UN

SYDNEY: Australia’s ‘punitive approach’ to boatpeople has tarnished its human rights record, the United Nations said yesterday as it voiced concern that xenophobia and hate speech was on the rise.

Canberra sends asylum-seekers trying to reach Australia by sea to isolated outposts on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, with the detention camps’ conditions widely criticised by refugee advocates and medical profession­als.

Following an 18-day mission to Australia, UN special rapporteur Francois Crepeau said migrant rights had deteriorat­ed under current government policy. — AFP

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