An Italian coast guard ship headed toward Sicily Monday with 27 survivors of what could be the Mediterranean’s deadliest migrant tragedy, as EU foreign ministers gathered for an emergency meeting on the growing crisis as migrants flee instability in Libya at unprecedented rates.
Meanwhile, another vessel carrying dozens of immigrants ran aground off the Greek island of Rhodes and at least three have drowned, the Greek coast guard said Monday. About 80 people have been rescued so far and 23 of those had been taken to hospital, a Greek coast guard official told Reuters.
On Monday, the International Organization for Migration said its Rome office has received a distress call from international waters in the Mediterranean about three boats in need of help. The IOM says the caller reported 300 people on his boat with about 20 fatalities and said the boat was sinking. The caller provided no information on the other boats.
THE SURVIVORS: ‘MANY, MANY PERSONS’ ON BOARD
In the Maltese capital Valletta, coast-guard officers brought ashore the 24 corpses found so far. Wearing white protective suits, they carried the victims in body-bags off the Italian ship Gregoretti and deposited them in hearses as survivors looked on from the deck.
One survivor, identified as a 32-year-old Bangladeshi, has put the number of people on board the smugglers’ boat when it capsized near the Libyan coast at 950, and only a handful have been rescued. The survivor was flown Sunday by helicopter to Catania, where he was interviewed by prosecutors. He was being treated in a hospital. “He is pretty well now and he is reporting that there were really many, many persons including children on the boat. So it’s confirming the terrible news,” said Carlotta Sami, a UN refugee agency spokeswoman.
International agencies stressed that the information provided to prosecutors still needs to be confirmed.
EUROPE: MINISTERS PRESS FOR ACTION ON MIGRANTS
EU foreign ministers are meeting in Luxembourg Monday focusing on the migration crisis and the role of the conflict in Libya fueling the influx. The EU’s top migration official, Dimitris Avramopoulos, has cancelled a trip to the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla to attend.
Europe’s politicians face criticism from aid and human-rights groups that they have been abandoning those in need of help to pander to anti-immigrant sentiment among the electorates in their home countries. However there are differing views among what needs to be done, from ramping up costly search and rescue operations to trying to intervene in lawless Libya, where the vast majority of migrant boats depart.
This year more than 1,500 people fleeing war and poverty are estimated to have died in the Mediterranean, packed into rickety boats by human traffickers in a bid to reach a better life in Europe. The deaths are up 15-fold compared with the same period of 2014.
Fighting in Libya has escalated to its worst levels since the 2011 civil war that ended with the overthrow and killing of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Malta and Italy are closest to the Libyan coast, and have received the brunt of a migrant tide that carried 219,000 people from Africa to Europe last year. Some 3,500 died or went missing along the way, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said in a statement Sunday.
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