Tag Archives: migrants drowning

Italy says migrant boat capsized, second in two days

Migrants are seen on a partially submerged boat before to be rescued by Spanish fregate Reina Sofia off the coast of Libya

ROME (Reuters) – A migrant boat capsized in the Mediterranean on Thursday, an Italian coastguard spokesman said, and 88 people have been rescued while the number of possible dead is unknown.

It was the second shipwreck in two days, after five were confirmed to have died when a large fishing boat flipped over in the sea on Wednesday.

Boat arrivals in Italy have risen sharply this week amid warm weather and calm seas, and about 20 rescue operations are currently under way, the spokesman said.

Between 20 and 30 people are feared dead, Ansa news agency reported without saying where it got the information, while the coastguard declined to estimate how many may have died.

“We don’t know how many people were on board,” the coastguard spokesman said.

An aircraft from the European Union’s Sophia mission to fight people smuggling spotted the overturned vessel and called in the coastguard to assist in the rescue.

The coastguard has coordinated the rescue of around 900 migrants in seven different operations on Thursday. That brings the total of migrants who have been rescued since Monday to more than 7,000.

Through Tuesday, total sea arrivals in Italy had fallen by 9 percent this year, to 37,743, according to the Interior Ministry, but the country’s migrant shelters are already under pressure to house 115,507 migrants, about twice as many as two years ago.

Some 650 migrants are scheduled to arrive in the Sicilian city of Porto Empedocle later on Thursday, including the five dead bodies recovered by the Italian navy on Wednesday.

(Reporting by Steve Scherer, editing by Isla Binnie and Ralph Boulton)

Up to 500 migrants might have drowned in crammed ship

Migrants sit in a rubber dinghy during a rescue operation by SOS Mediterranee ship Aquarius off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa

ROME (Reuters) – Up to 500 migrants might have drowned in the Mediterranean last week when human traffickers crammed people onto an already overcrowded ship, causing it to sink, the U.N. refugee agency said on Wednesday.

Somalia’s government said on Monday about 200 or more Somalis may have died in the tragedy while trying to cross illegally to Europe. After talking to survivors, the UNHCR agency said the overall death toll might have been much higher.

“If confirmed, as many as 500 people may have lost their lives when a large ship went down in the Mediterranean Sea at an unknown location between Libya and Italy,” the UNHCR said.

The agency said the survivors – 37 men, three women and a three-year-old child – were rescued by a merchant ship and taken to Greece on April 16.

They recounted that they had been among 100 to 200 people who set sail from Libya last week headed for Italy. After several hours at sea, the traffickers tried to move them onto a bigger ship that was already packed with migrants.

This ship sank before the survivors could board it. They then drifted at sea for up to three days before being saved. The group was made up of 23 Somalis, 11 Ethiopians, six Egyptians and one Sudanese national.

The Somali government said on Monday that the capsized boat had set sail from Egypt.

News of the disaster emerged on the first anniversary of one of the worst disasters in the Mediterranean in recent times, when an estimated 800 migrants drowned off the Libyan coast after the fishing boat they were sailing in collided with a mercantile vessel that had been attempting to rescue them.

Some 150,000 migrants reached Italy by boat in 2015, the vast majority sailing from Libya. So far this year, about 25,000 migrants have arrived, an increase of 4.7 percent over the same period last year, according to Interior Ministry data.

(Reporting by Crispian Balmer; Editing by Tom Heneghan)