Greater than 60 migrants drowned in a shipwreck off Libya, a global migrant company mentioned on Saturday, one other chapter within the unrelenting toll within the Mediterranean Sea as individuals in Africa flee famine, battle and different upheavals for distant shores.
The Worldwide Group for Migration in Libya mentioned in a post on the social platform X that girls and youngsters have been among the many 61 migrants who died. The Libyan authorities didn’t instantly touch upon the company’s report.
The boat had set off from the Libyan metropolis of Zwara with about 86 individuals, the company mentioned, citing survivors of the shipwreck. It was unclear precisely when it started its voyage. The I.O.M. mentioned “the central Mediterranean continues to be one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes.”
Earlier this yr, a minimum of 73 migrants died in one other catastrophe off the Libyan coast. That episode concerned a ship carrying a minimum of 80 those that was believed to have departed from Qasr Alkayar, Libya, on Feb. 14, sure for Europe, the I.O.M. said on the time. Seven individuals survived, and 11 our bodies have been recovered, it mentioned.
Greater than 28,000 Africans have died or disappeared within the Mediterranean since 2014, in response to I.O.M. data. Many set off for north to nations like Italy and Greece, in one among Europe’s most defining challenges.
In June, at least 79 people drowned within the Mediterranean after a big boat carrying migrants sank, the Greek authorities mentioned, within the deadliest such episode off the nation’s coast because the top of the 2015 migration disaster. Greater than 100 individuals have been rescued.
And in February, a picket boat with 130 to 180 migrants broke aside in opposition to rocks close to a seaside city in southern Italy, drowning a minimum of 59 individuals, together with a new child and different youngsters, the authorities mentioned.
European leaders have put in place a patchwork of insurance policies to deal with the inflow, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy saying in November that her authorities had struck an settlement with Albania, a non-European Union nation throughout the Adriatic Sea, to outsource the processing and containment of migrants. However Italian politicians stunned by Ms. Meloni’s announcement questioned whether or not the settlement was authorized, moral, sensible and even actual.
Greece has taken a troublesome line on migrants. Its judiciary has cracked down on nongovernmental organizations that work with migrants, and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s authorities has been accused of illegally pushing asylum seekers back at sea.
