Migrant advocates decry loss of lives in Mediterranean
ROME – Rescue groups and the Vatican are decrying the latest deaths of migrants who put to sea in traffickers’ unseaworthy boats, amid laments that central Mediterranean nations are choosing not to dispatch vessels to save them.
Aid group Alarm Phone said in a tweet that despite a spotter plane locating an overcrowded boat in the sea north of Libya on Wednesday and pleas for help from the occupants, “only nonstate actors actively searched for the boat in distress at sea.”
By the time a charity rescue ship reached the site on Thursday evening, the boat had capsized and all the estimated 130 occupants are believed to have drowned.
“Abandoned and buried at sea” read the headline across a photo of the sea on the front page of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper on Saturday.
On Sunday, Pope Francis somberly built on the newspaper’s denunciation of what he called a “moment of shame.”
“Let us pray ... for those who can help but who prefer to look the other way. Let’s pray for them in silence,” he told the public in St. Peter’s Square.
The existence of the dangerously overcrowded boat was first signaled in a call to the aid group Alarm Phone on Wednesday.
Alarm Phone said it was in contact with the dinghy over a period of 10 hours on Wednesday. It said it “repeatedly relayed its GPS position and the dire situation on board to European and Libyan authorities and the wider public.”
The European Union border protection agency Frontex told The Associated Press in an interview that it had alerted Italian, Maltese and Libyan authorities after one of its patrol planes spotted the dinghy.
“Despite Frontex spotting the distressed boat from the sky, only nonstate actors actively searched for the boat in distress at sea,” Alarm Phone said in a tweeted statement.
The Libyan coast guard has said bad weather, combined with the need to rescue other migrants off the Libyan coast, prevented involvement in the efforts to help the dinghy.
The traffickers were particularly reckless to launch the doomed dinghy in such conditions, Frontex spokesman Krzysztof Borowski said. “There were massive waves, (6-10 feet) high. It was almost guaranteed that a rubber dinghy would overturn and people all end up in the sea.”