CAIRO — A ship carrying dozens of migrants making an attempt to achieve Europe capsized off the coast of Libya, leaving greater than 60 individuals useless, together with girls and youngsters, the U.N. migration company stated.
Saturday’s shipwreck was the newest tragedy on this a part of the Mediterranean Sea, a key however harmful route for migrants in search of a greater life in Europe. 1000’s have died, in response to officers.
The U.N.’s Worldwide Group for Migration stated in a press release the boat was carrying 86 migrants when robust waves swamped it off the city of Zuwara on Libya’s western coast and that 61 migrants drowned, in response to survivors.
“The central Mediterranean continues to be one of many world’s most harmful migration routes,” the company wrote on social media platform X, previously generally known as Twitter.
Alarm Cellphone — a hotline for migrants in misery — stated in a tweet that some migrants onboard reached out to the volunteer group who in flip alerted authorities together with the “Libyan coastguard who acknowledged that they’d not seek for them.”
A spokesman for the Libyan coast guard was not instantly obtainable for remark.
Libya has lately emerged because the dominant transit level for migrants fleeing warfare and poverty in Africa and the Center East, despite the fact that the North African nation has plunged into chaos following a NATO-backed rebellion that toppled and killed longtime autocrat Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.
Greater than 2,250 individuals died on the central European route this yr, in response to Flavio Di Giacomo, an IOM spokesperson.
It’s “a dramatic determine which demonstrates that sadly not sufficient is being carried out to avoid wasting lives at sea,” Di Giacomo wrote on X.
In keeping with the IOM’s lacking migrants mission, not less than 940 migrants have been reported useless and 1,248 lacking off Libya between Jan. 1 and Nov. 18.
The mission, which tracks migration actions, stated about 14,900 migrants, together with over 1,000 girls and greater than 530 kids, have been intercepted and returned to Libya this yr.
In 2022, the mission reported 529 useless and 848 lacking off Libya. Over 24,600 have been intercepted and returned to Libya.
Human traffickers lately have benefited from the chaos in Libya, smuggling in migrants throughout the nation’s prolonged borders, which it shares with six nations. The migrants are crowded onto ill-equipped vessels, together with rubber boats, and set off on dangerous sea voyages.
Those that are intercepted and returned to Libya are held in government-run detention facilities rife with abuses, together with compelled labor, beatings, rapes and torture — practices that quantity to crimes towards humanity, in response to U.N.-commissioned investigators.
The abuse typically accompanies makes an attempt to extort cash from the households of the imprisoned migrants earlier than permitting them to depart Libya on traffickers’ boats to Europe.
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