Hundreds of people are feared to have drowned in the southern Mediterranean last week, in what would be the deadliest migrant shipwreck in months.
A repurposed fishing boat overloaded by smugglers with up to 500 Africans hoping to reach Italy from eastern Libya may have sunk, survivors told 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.
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 said in a statement.
A Somali community leader in Egypt 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 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. 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 said.
After the shipwreck, survivors were left to drift in the smaller boat, until they were spotted and rescued by a merchant ship on 16 April and taken to the Greek mainland. The date of the sinking itself is unclear, but by coincidence it would have happened near the anniversary of the Mediterranean’s deadliest modern shipwreck
Survivor testimonies
The survivors’ testimonies clarify a situation that was the subject of conflicting rumours for several days. Previous versions had variously claimed that the boat left from Egypt, or that survivors had been taken to Italy or a Greek island.
The survivors will not be deported to Turkey under the terms of a new
deal between Turkey and the EU, since they departed from Libya - a war-torn country with whom the EU has not yet negotiated a returns agreement.
As a result, their arrivals highlight the limits of the EU-Turkey deal as a means of preventing migration to Europe. While the deal has made it harder for people to reach Greece, other routes to Europe exist - including from Libya.
More than 170,000 people reached Europe from Libya in 2014, while 150,000 tried the same route in 2015.
Nearly 25,000 have already followed in their wake in 2016, roughly the same level as this time last year.
The flow consists almost exclusively of people from sub-Saharan Africa. Syrians have yet to reach Libya following the closure of the Greek route, but migration specialists expect them to try again from Libya in increasing numbers later in the year.
The shipwreck has prompted renewed calls from refugee advocates for western countries to provide safe and legal access to Europe.
In a statement, UNHCR called on Europe to provide “increased regular pathways for admission of refugees and asylum seekers to manage the emergency in Europe. Additional possibilities for resettlement and humanitarian admission, family reunification, private sponsorship, and humanitarian and refugee student and work visas all serve to reduce demand for people smuggling, onward movement, and dangerous boat journeys.”
Guardian News and Media 2016