About 500 migrants feared dead in Mediterranean

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Hundreds of people are feared to have drowned in the southern Mediterranean last week, in what would be the deadliest migrant shipwreck in months, The Guardian newspaper reports.A repurposed fishing boat overloaded by smugglers with up to 500 Africans hoping to reach Italy from eastern Libya may have sunk, the newspaper quoted survivors as telling the UN refugee agency.

 

A death toll of just half the size would bring the total number of mortalities in the Mediterranean in 2016 to over 1,000 – more than a quarter of last year’s record tally, accordinig to the report.

 

The disaster reportedly happened several miles out to sea, after the smugglers tried to transfer a group of migrants from a smaller to a larger boat, survivors said. The larger boat was already overburdened, and began to sink under the strain of extra passengers. “Due to the overcrowding, the large boat sank,” UNHCR was quoted to have said in a statement.

 

A Somali community leader in Egypt was quoted to have said that some of the dead appeared to have been part of Egypt’s Somali expatriate community. “Families in Egypt are weeping for their children who drowned in the sea,” he reportedly said. “I keep seeing pictures of the people who drowned on social media. Some of them were my students.”

 

The 41 survivors included those who had yet to be transferred from the small vessel, as well as a number of those who swam back to the smaller boat after the larger one began to sink, said the Guardian. They include people from Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt.

 

The survivors “claim to have been part of, and to have witnessed, a large shipwreck that took place in the Mediterranean Sea claiming the lives of approximately 500 people,” UNHCR reportedly said.

Source: Prothom Alo