TRIPOLI: Libya has called off efforts to retrieve bodies of over 200 illegal migrants who drowned when their overcrowded boat capsized last week in stormy waters of the Mediterranean as they set off for a better life in Europe.
Laurence Hart, an official with the International Organization for Migration in Libya, said yesterday that authorities stopped the rescue operation since chances were slim of finding more survivors from Friday’s incident.
Only 20 survived when the wooden vessel with 257 people on board, mostly African migrants and including 70 women and two children — both of whom died — sunk only three hours off Libya. Hart said aid workers heard survivors’ accounts at the Twesha refugee center outside of Tripoli yesterday.
Bad weather and passenger panic caused the deadly sinking of the boat, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said yesterday. Survivors told IOM staff that the smuggler, an Egyptian national, was among those who drowned when the boat capsized three hours after it left Janzour, 15 km west of Tripoli, on Monday.
“The migrants said they had survived because they had stayed at the back of the boat, the only part to have stayed afloat,” the IOM said in a statement, which said there were 257 people on board the ship, of whom 70 were women and two were children.
About 20 migrants survived the accident, including one woman, it said. Many survivors had kidney problems after having drunk seawater, but otherwise appeared in good health.
Earlier yesterday, Libyan authorities said they recovered the bodies of 100 of the migrants. “Seventy-seven bodies of the migrants washed up in the beach west of Tripoli late on Tuesday and 23 more bodies were found between Sunday night and Tuesday,” an official told Reuters.
Estimates of the total number aboard the ship vary. Libyan officials believe there were 365 people attempting the journey on the boat that was supposed to hold only 75. The migrants were Somalis, Nigerians, Eritreans, Kurds, Algerians, Moroccans, Palestinians and Tunisians, according to the officials. The ill-fated ship was one of four migrant boats, which had sailed from Libya between Saturday and Sunday, apparently heading to Italy.
Libyan Coast Guards had rescued 350 migrants, many of them women and children, after their boat broke down on Sunday near a Libyan offshore oilfield, they said. “As for the fate of the two remaining boats, we have information that one had reached Italy and the latest information we had about the other boat was it had left Libyan waters and was spotted close to Malta,” a Libyan official said.
