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More than 100 migrants and refugees are feared drowned after the boats they were travelling in capsized off Libya‘s coast in the Mediterranean Sea, aid agencies said on Thursday.
Ayoub Qasim, a spokesman for Libya’s coast guard, told The Associated Press that two boats carrying around 300 migrants sank around 120km east of the capital, Tripoli, before adding that 134 migrants and refugees were rescued.
However, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in a Twitter post on Thursday that more than 150 people were feared drowned while 145 were rescued and returned to Libya after the incident.
“The worst Mediterranean tragedy of this year has just occurred,” said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.
He called on European nations to resume rescue missions in the Mediterranean, halted after an EU decision, and appealed for an end to migrant detentions in Libya.
I don’t want anything now except to go back to my country Sudan, to die there
Sabah Youssef, survivor who lost her seven-year-old child
He said safe pathways out of the North African country are needed “before it is too late for many more desperate people.”
Qasimm told AFP news agency that most of the rescued migrants were from Ethiopia while others were Palestinians and Sudanese.
Sabah Youssef from Sudan lost her seven-year-old child after the boat sank. “I don’t want anything now except to go back to my country Sudan, to die there,” Youssef, who was rescued, told Reuters.
Some of the survivors shared their ordeal at the sea.
“In the afternoon, we started from Libya going to Italy, but when we went there, after one hour the ship started to sink and most of them (migrants) sank,” an unnamed survivor from Eretria told Associated Press.
Another survivor from Eretria added: “We rescued ourselves. No-one could help us and no one came to rescue us, and here we are in a big problem so we need your (International community) help.”
🚨Urgent: tragic shipwreck may have occurred in the central mediterranean.
Nearly 150 migrants are reported missing and 145 more returned to Libyan shore.— IOM Libya (@IOM_Libya) July 25, 2019
The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) spokesman Charlie Yaxley said the survivors were picked up by local fishermen and then taken back to shore by the Libyan coastguard.
“We estimate that 150 migrants are potentially missing and died at sea,” he said. “The dead include women and children.”
Libya is one of the main departure points for migrants and refugees fleeing poverty and war in the Middle East and Africa and attempting to reach Europe by boat via the Mediterranean.
Those who make the journey often travel in overcrowded and unsafe vessels.
Nearly 700 deaths have been recorded in the Mediterranean so far this year, according to the IOM, almost half as many as the 1,425 registered in 2018.
An estimated 6,000 refugees and migrants are held in detention centres across Libya, while some 50,000 registered refugees and asylum seekers reside elsewhere in the country, according to the UNHCR.
‘Preventable deaths’
The UN has repeatedly cautioned the conflict-wracked sprawling North African country is not a safe place for migrants and refugees to be held in and called for those in detention centres to be released.
It has also urged the European Union to drop its policy of backing the Libyan coastguard to intercept and forcibly return people caught while trying to cross to Europe from the country.
The EU ended its naval patrols in the Mediterranean in March due to disagreements on how to divide those rescued among EU member states.
Italy’s far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has objected to the existing arrangement because most of the rescued migrants and refugees were brought to Italian ports.
Salvini, who is also Italy’s deputy prime minister, has also barred charity rescue vessels from docking at Italy’s ports, and threatened to fine transgressors tens of thousands of euros and impound their vessels.
Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in recent days slammed the EU’s approach, saying the “suffering” of migrants and refugees in Libya and “deaths” of others in the Mediterranean were “preventable”.
“Politicians would have you believe that the deaths of hundreds of people at sea, and the suffering of thousands of refugees and migrants trapped in Libya, are the acceptable price of attempts to control migration,” MSF’s Head of Mission for Search and Rescue in Libya, Sam Turner, said in a statement on Sunday.
“The cold reality is that while they herald the end of the so-called “European migration crisis”, they are knowingly turning a blind eye to the humanitarian crisis these policies perpetuate in Libya and at sea,” he added.
