700 feared dead as migrant boat capsizes off Libyan coast

[Devil Soul]

700 feared dead as migrant boat capsizes off Libyan coast
AP | REUTERS — UPDATED 11 minutes ago

A boat transporting migrants arrives in the port of Messina after a rescue operation at sea on April 18, 2015 in Sicily. ─ AFP
ROME/PALERMO: As many as 700 people are feared dead after a boat carrying migrants capsized off the Libyan coast overnight, a United Nations official said on Sunday.

Antonino Irato, a senior official from the Italian border police told television station RaiNews24 that 28 people were rescued in the incident, and 24 bodies had been recovered, adding that the boat had capsized just off Libyan waters, south of the southern Italian island of Lampedusa.

If confirmed, the death toll would bring the total number of dead since the beginning of the year to more than 1,500.

The boat is believed to have capsized when the migrants shifted to one side of the overcrowded vessel as a merchant ship approached.

“The first details came from one of the survivors who spoke English and who said that at least 700 people, if not more, were on board. The boat capsized because people moved to one side when another vessel that they hoped would rescue them approached,” said Carlotta Sami, a spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee.

Italian officials said navy and coast guard vessels, as well as merchant ships in the area and a Maltese patrol boat, were involved in the search and rescue operation, which was being coordinated by the Italian coast guard in Rome.

The new deaths fuelled calls for a stronger response from Europe to the increasingly deadly decades-long migrant crisis playing out in the Mediterranean.

International aid groups and Italian authorities have criticised Europe's so-called “Triton” border protection operation, which recently replaced a more comprehensive Italian search-and-rescue mission.

“A tragedy is unfolding in the Mediterranean, and if the EU and the world continue to close their eyes, it will be judged in the harshest terms as it was judged in the past when it closed its eyes to genocides when the comfortable did nothing,” Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said.

“They are literally trying to find people alive among the dead floating in the water,” he added.

There was still no decision on where the survivors and the bodies that had been recovered would be taken.

Just last week, 400 people were presumed drowned when another boat capsized.

Know more: Nearly 400 migrants die in shipwreck off Libya, 150 rescued

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said Europe was witnessing “systematic slaughter in the Mediterranean”.

“How can we remain insensible when we're witnessing entire populations dying at a time when modern means of communications allow us to be aware of everything?” Renzi said at a political event in Mantua.

On his way back to Rome, where he was expected to give a news conference later, Renzi spoke by telephone to French President Francois Hollande.

The leader of the anti-immigrant Northern League party, Matteo Salvini, who has made migration one of the centrepieces of his political agenda, called for a an immediate naval blockade of the coast of Libya.

The lawless state of Libya, following the toppling of former leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, has left criminal gangs of migrant smugglers a free hand to send a stream of boats carrying desperate migrants from Africa and the Middle East.

Around 20,000 migrants have reached the Italian coast this year, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) estimates. That is fewer than in the first four months of last year, but the number of deaths has risen almost nine-fold.

In 2013, the previous government initiated the search-and-rescue operation “Mare Nostrum” or “Our Sea” after hundreds drowned in an incident off the coast of Lampedusa.

The operation was cancelled last year, because of the cost and because some politicians said it encouraged migrants to depart by raising their hopes of being rescued.

That made way for the European Union's border control mission, Triton. However Triton, which has a much smaller budget and narrower remit, has been criticised by humanitarian groups and Italy as inadequate to tackle the scale of the problem.

Know more: Migrant crisis intensifies with arrests, deaths

On Saturday, Pope Francis joined Italy in pressing the European Union to do more to help the country cope with the soaring numbers of arrivals, which include more than 10,000 in the week ending Saturday.

Italy says it will continue rescuing migrants but demands that the EU increase assistance to shelter and rescue them.

Italy says the EU's border control agency, Frontex, must take a greater role in coordinating rescue operations.

Frontex technically is a border patrol operation, not responsible for search and rescue efforts. Because most migrants want to reach family or other members of their community in northern Europe, Italian governments have pushed for those countries to do more, particularly by taking in the migrants while their requests for asylum or refugee status are examined.

The EU's commissioner for migration, Dmitris Avramopoulos, says a new policy will be presented in May. He also has called for other EU members to provide more aid to Italy.

 

[Aepsilons]

RIP to those who perished in the high seas.

 

[ArsalanKhan21]

What a shame ! Libya is rich with oil but poor in leadership. The country is in chaos and people want to escape from anarchy to safety in Europe. These rich Arab Shiekhdoms should learn a lesson by looking at Libya, Iraq and Iran whose petroleum built infrastructure has been destroyed. The absolute monarchies and dictators have destroyed their countries just to protect themselves.

 

[flamer84]

A French Minister has proposed yesterday in the EU summit that Eastern European countries should "share the burden" and accomodate immigrants according to designed quotas.

not going to happen !!!

@Gabriel92 who is this idiot , Harlem Désir ? He's caused quite a stirr in here...

 

[Gabriel92]

A French Minister has proposed yesterday in the EU summit that Eastern European countries should "share the burden" and accomodate immigrants according to designed quotas.

not going to happen !!!

@Gabriel92 who is this idiot , Harlem Désir ? He's caused quite a stirr in here...

I won't say what we think about him here..

 

[ArsalanKhan21]

That may be the future in Saudi Arabia and Gulf Shaikhdoms if there is war and anarchy. These stupid Arab leaders don't care what will happen to their people future they just want their petty war. They could also be dragged dead like Moammar Qaddafi.

Death toll put at 800: Survivors tell of 1,000 migrants on Libyan beach desperate to board ill-fated trawler | National Post

Trisha Thomas And Colleen Barry, Associated Press | April 21, 2015 3:04 PM ET
More from Associated Press


Death toll put at 800: Survivors tell of 1,000 migrants on Libyan beach desperate to board ill-fated trawler | National Post

Death toll put at 800: Survivors tell of 1,000 migrants on Libyan beach desperate to board ill-fated trawler

CATANIA, Italy — The United Nations refugee agency said Tuesday that more than 800 people were believed to have drowned in the weekend sinking of a boat packed with migrants trying to reach Europe, making it the deadliest such disaster in the Mediterranean.

New details of the tragedy emerged as the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and other aid agencies interviewed some of the 28 survivors who arrived overnight in Catania, Sicily.

Survivors put the number of passengers on board the three-decked fishing trawler at 850, according to UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards in Geneva.

Only 24 bodies have been recovered, leaving an estimated 798 bodies adrift in the Mediterranean or, more likely, trapped in the sunken trawler.

“From available information and the various accounts we’ve had, UNHCR now believes the number of fatalities to have been over 800, making this the deadliest incident in the Mediterranean that we have recorded,” Edwards told reporters in Geneva.

Matthew Mirabelli / AFP / Getty ImagesThis picture taken on April 20, 2015 shows a man now identified as Tunisian national Mohammed Ali Malek, one of the survivors and understood to be the captain of the boat that overturned off the coasts of Libya, sitting on board the Italian Coast Guard vessel Bruno Gregoretti at Boiler Wharf, Senglea in Malta.
Prosecutors in Catania said a special email address had been set up for relatives, friends and acquaintances of the victims in hopes of determining who was on board.

Still, they acknowledged the exact death toll may never be known. “No facts have emerged that can be helpful to determine in a more precise way the number of dead,” prosecutors said in a statement.

The International Organization for Migration said the rate of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean this year is far higher than in 2014, when a total of 3,279 migrants died. So far this year, 1,776 have died, according to the U.N. refugee agency.

The 2015 death toll “could well top 30,000,” said Joel Millman, the IOM spokesman. “We just want to make sure people understand how much more … rapid these deaths have been coming this year than last year.”

Alessandro Fucarini / Associated PressThe King Jacob Portuguese cargo vassel, the first ship to arrive near a boat believed to be crowded with 700 migrant in distress, only to see it capsizing in the waters north of Libya.
Survivors told aid workers the wreck was caused when one of the smugglers crashed the boat against the Portuguese-flagged King Jacob container ship that had responded to a distress call, according to UNHCR spokeswoman Carlotta Sami.

“The survivors said that the person who was steering the boat, their smuggler, was navigating badly, and he did a bad move that made it crash against the bigger ship,” Sami said by telephone from Sicily.

Prosecutors said that after the trawler captain, a 27-year-old Tunisian identified as Mohammed Ali Malek, rammed the Portuguese vessel, terrified migrants rushed to one side of the overcrowded boat, which was already unbalanced from the collision. The trawler pitched in the water before finally tipping over, and sank.

Most on board were unable to escape because they were locked below deck on the trawler’s lower two levels. Hundreds more were squeezed on the upper deck, according to prosecutors.

Malek and another crew member, Mahmud Bikhit, 25, are likely to be charged with engaging in illegal migration and multiple counts of homicide.

Mistreatment began before the migrants even set foot aboard the doomed boat on the night of April 16, prosecutors said in a statement, citing survivor accounts.

The migrants had been held for as long as 30 days on a farm near where the boat was docked before being transported in groups of about 30 in trucks to the embarking point, it said.

“In one instance, one of the migrants was allegedly struck with a club because he stepped away” to go to the bathroom, the statement said.

Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesman for the International Organization of Migration who was on the scene, said the boat was carrying migrants from Mali, Gambia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Eritrea, Somalia, Bangladesh and Ivory Coast.

Di Giacomo said in The New York Times that survivors told him that as the vessel prepared to leave Libya, 1,000 people – all men – were lined up on the beach to board.

“They were putting us inside like fish,” one of the men told him. The migrants said that women and children were the last in line, and that most of them didn’t get on the boat.


Alessandra Tarantino / AP PhotoA survivor of the boat that overturned off the coast of Libya Saturday, disembarks from Italian Coast Guard ship Bruno Gregoretti, at Catania Harbor, Italy, on Monday, April 20, 2015.
Di Giacomo said that while “the testimonies are not very clear, they are convergent.” He said of the migrants, “They are traumatized about what happened – but they are also traumatized about Libya.”

The weekend deaths have jolted the European Union into trying to come up with a plan to address the crisis, with Italy demanding that it not be left alone to shoulder the burden of rescues and that the EU focus on preventing the boats from leaving Libya.

Combatting the smugglers by arresting the ringleaders and destroying their boats is emerging as a key part of Europe’s 10-point proposal for an emergency summit in Brussels on Thursday.

Survivors of the weekend disaster were brought Tuesday to a migrant holding centre in Catania and were “very tired, very shocked, silent,” according to Di Giacomo.

Sami said all the survivors were men, several of them adolescents. “They are very confused, fragile and scared,” she said.

Guardia CostieraThis video grab released by the Italian Coast Guard on April 21, 2015 shows a boat off the coast of Calabria full off 446 migrants that were all rescued early on April 21, 2015.
The coast guard, meanwhile, reported that it saved some 638 migrants in six different rescue operations on Monday alone. On Tuesday, a further 446 people were rescued from a leaking migrant ship about 130 kilometres south of the Calabrian coast.

The smugglers use a variety of boats for their crossings, from rubber Zodiac-type boats to wooden fishing vessels and even old cargo ships. They are almost always overcrowded to maximize the revenue of the smugglers, who charge between 1,000 and 1,500 euros for the crossing from Libya, where most trafficking operations originate.

Not all those turning to smugglers to escape conflict or violence are risking their lives in unseaworthy boats. Police in Ragusa, a Sicilian port town, said they arrested three Syrians connected to a Turkish-flagged luxury yacht that charged passengers $8,500 for the trip from Turkey to Sicily. Among the Syrian and Palestinian passengers were 23 children.

Selfies and other photos snapped by passengers helped police identify the smugglers, police said in a statement. They estimated that the organizers were paid some US$800,000 in total for the trip. Authorities discovered the yacht was a smuggling boat when two merchant ships were called out to aid a boat in distress.