Hundreds feared dead in sinking
As many as 500 people are feared dead after a shipwreck last week in the Mediterranean Sea, two international groups say, describing survivors’ accounts of panicked passengers who desperately tried to stay afloat by jumping between vessels.
The disaster happened in the waters between Italy and Libya, based on accounts from 41 survivors who were rescued last Sunday by a merchant ship, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said yesterday.
The tragedy ranks among the deadliest in recent years on the often treacherous sea route across the central Mediterranean by refugees and migrants from Africa, the Middle East and beyond, who have travelled in droves hoping to reach relatively peaceful and wealthy Europe.
While the accounts provided by the IOM and the UNHCR vary slightly, both organisations said up to 200 people left the coastal town of Tobruk last week headed for a larger vessel already carrying hundreds of people in the Mediterranean.
The IOM said the 200 people had left on several small boats, while the UNHCR said 100 to 200 people left in a single 30m boat.
The UNHCR said the larger boat was already facing ‘‘terribly overcrowded conditions’’ before the newcomers arrived.
‘‘Once transferred to the larger vessel – now with an estimated 500 on board – it began taking on water,’’ the IOM said, citing survivors’ accounts. ‘‘The vessel started to sink, and panicking passengers tried to jump into the smaller boats they had arrived in.’’
‘‘The survivors told IOM that most of those aboard the larger vessel tragically died.’’
The IOM quoted an Ethiopian survivor identified only as Mohamed as saying: ‘‘I saw my wife and my 2-month old child died at sea, together with my brotherin-law . . . All the people died in a matter of minutes.’’
The survivors ‘‘drifted at sea for a few days, without food, without anything’’, Mohamed said. He said the migrants had intended to go to Italy, not Greece.
IOM Athens Chief of Mission Daniel Esdras said the organisation was awaiting investigations by authorities ‘‘to better understand what actually happened and find hopefully evidence against criminal smugglers’’.
Greek authorities said a cargo ship picked up 41 people on Sunday from a wooden boat that was without steering about 175km south of the Greek mainland. The Greek authorities did not describe them as survivors or say anything about a boat sinking.
The survivors were then taken to Kalamata, Greece, where IOM and UNHCR staffers interviewed them.
According to the IOM’s Missing Migrants project, the death toll is the largest from a sinking on the central Mediterranean since one south of the Italian island of Lampedusa in April last year, in which 772 people died. Its largest recorded toll was an October 2013 incident in the same area, when about 800 people died. Several other accidents since then have taken 400 to 500 lives.
This year the IOM has tallied nearly 800 migrant deaths on the central Mediterranean route, and cites reports of another 377 on the eastern route between Turkey and Greece.