180 feared dead in fresh refugee boat disaster
Print Edition
ABOUT 180 people are presumed to have died in the first major migrant boat disaster of 2017 in the Mediterranean, officials said yesterday after interviewing a handful of survivors.
Humanitarian workers from the International Organization for Migration and the UN refugee agency, recounted harrowing details of a capsize that occurred on Saturday in waters off Libya after talking to four rescued passengers, two Eritreans and two Ethiopians.
The survivors, three men and one woman, arrived on Monday evening in the Sicilian port of Trapani, in a “traumatized and exhausted” state, aid workers said.
They said their two-tier, wooden boat had left Libya on Friday with more than 180 people packed on board, all of them originally from East Africa.
After five hours at sea, the engine cut out and the boat started to take on water. As it slowly sank, more and more of the people on board were submerged.
One of the survivors described his desperate effort to find his wife, who had taken a spot in the center of the ship along with around 70 other women. A number of children were also on board and none of them survived.
After hours in the water, the four survivors were rescued on Saturday 30 nautical miles from the Libyan coast by a French boat operating as part of the European borders agency Frontex’s Operation Triton.
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