Scores of refugees and migrants are feared drowned after the
boats they were travelling in capsized off Libya's coast in
the Mediterranean Sea, according to aid agencies and officials.
Nearly 700 deaths have been recorded in the Mediterranean so far this year, according to the UN |
Ayoub Qasim, a spokesman for Libya's coastguard, told The
Associated Press news agency that two boats carrying around 300 people sank
around 120km east of the capital, Tripoli, before adding that 134
others were rescued.
However, the
International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in a Twitter post on
Thursday that more than 150 people were feared drowned while 145 were
rescued and returned to Libya after the incident.
Charlie
Yaxley, spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR),
said the survivors were picked up by local fishermen and then taken back
to shore by the Libyan coastguard.
"We estimate that 150
migrants are potentially missing and died at sea," he said. "The dead
include women and children."
"The worst Mediterranean
tragedy of this year has just occurred," Filippo Grandi, the United
Nations high commissioner for
refugees, said.
He called on European nations
to resume rescue missions in the Mediterranean, halted after
a European Union decision, and appealed for an end to migrant detentions in
Libya. Safe pathways out of the North
African country are needed "before it is too late for many more desperate
people", Grandi said.
Qasim
told AFP news agency that most of the rescued from the sea were from Ethiopia
while others were Palestinians and Sudanese.
Sabah Youssef, from Sudan,
lost her seven-year-old child after the boat sank. "I don't want anything
now except to go back to my country, Sudan, to die there," Youssef, who
was rescued, told Reuters news agency.
Some of the survivors shared
their ordeal at the sea.
"In the afternoon, we
started from Libya going to Italy, but when we went there, after one hour the
ship started to sink and most of them (people) sank," an unnamed survivor
from Eritrea told AP.
Migrants boat |
Another survivor from Eritrea
added: "We rescued ourselves. No-one could help us and no one came to
rescue us, and here we are in a big problem so we need your (International
community) help."
Libya
is one of the main departure points for migrants and refugees fleeing
poverty and war in the Middle East and Africa and attempting to reach Europe by
boat via the Mediterranean.
Those who make the journey
often travel in overcrowded and unsafe vessels.
Nearly
700 deaths have been recorded in the Mediterranean so far this year, according to the IOM, almost half as many as the 1,425
registered in 2018.
"If current trends for this year
continue, that will see us pass more than 1000 deaths in the Mediterranean for
the sixth year in a row," Yaxley,
the spokesman for UNHCR told Al Jazeera.
"That’s a really bleak milestone.
It comes just weeks after more than 50 people lost their lives in a detention
centre following an airstrike in Tajoura, and really once again stresses the
[need] for a shift in approach to the situation in Libya and the Mediterranean."
An estimated 6,000 refugees and migrants
are held in detention centres across Libya, while some 50,000 registered
refugees and asylum
seekers reside elsewhere in the country, according to the UNHCR.
The UN
has repeatedly warned that the conflict-wracked sprawling North African country
is not a safe place for migrants and refugees to be held in and called for
those in detention centres to be released.
It has
also urged the European Union to drop its policy of backing the Libyan
coastguard to intercept and forcibly return people caught while trying to cross
to Europe from the country.
The
EU ended its naval patrols in the Mediterranean
in March due to disagreements on how to divide those rescued among EU
member states.
Italy's
far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has objected to the existing
arrangement because most of the rescued migrants and refugees were brought to
Italian ports.
Salvini,
who is also Italy's deputy prime minister, has barred charity rescue
vessels from docking at Italy's ports, and threatened to fine
transgressors tens of thousands of euros and impound their vessels.
Medical
charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in recent days slammed the EU's approach, saying the
"suffering" of migrants and refugees in Libya and
"deaths" of others in the Mediterranean were
"preventable".
"Politicians
would have you believe that the deaths of hundreds of people at sea, and the
suffering of thousands of refugees and migrants trapped in Libya, are
the acceptable price of attempts to control migration," Sam
Turner, MSF's head of mission for search and rescue in Libya, said in
a statement on Sunday.
"The
cold reality is that while they herald the end of the so-called 'European
migration crisis', they are knowingly turning a blind eye to the humanitarian
crisis these policies perpetuate in Libya and at sea," he added.
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