Italy, 28. august 2015: IOM’s Chief of Mission for Libya, Othman Belbeisi, reported today on the latest deaths from that country’s coastal waters.
He said Libyan authorities under the Ministry of the Interior’s Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration (DCIM) “are expecting to receive another 150 survivors today. The rest of the people are still missing in the sea.”
IOM’s Libya chief added Libya’s government is poorly equipped to carry out rescue operations at sea.
Hundreds feared dead
IOM, working with a local partner, met the first groups of rescued migrants, who were transferred to the Sobrata centre west of Tripoli and given hygiene kits.
Belbeisi said IOM will be working through the day today (28/8) to collect information regarding the migrants’ nationalities and ages.
IOM teams in Italy, citing local media, say hundreds of people are feared dead from the twin shipwrecks.
“The Libyan coast guard worked overnight on Thursday to search for survivors,” said IOM’s Flavio Di Giacomo.
He said that at least 100 bodies were taken to a hospital in Zuwara, west of Tripoli.
Di Giacomo said according to media reports from Libya, victims included migrants from Syria, Bangladesh and several sub-Saharan African countries, although he explained the information could not be independently verified.
The remains of five children, aged between one and three years old, were among the bodies already recovered, as well as six men and one woman.
Zuwara is at the epicentre of the migrant crisis on the Libyan side, with many of the thousands of people who flee to Europe from Libya leaving from its 120km coastline.
Many still missing
The incident comes after another boat with 40 people overturned some five miles off the coast.
Only 25 people were pulled out alive, along with three bodies.
However, survivors, primarily from Nigeria and Ghana, insisted that they were traveling in a group of 40 when their boat overturned in bad weather. They had travelled some four hours from the shoreline.
Libya’s coast guard started the rescue at 4.00 am and continued with the search until sundown, but no more bodies were spotted.
Over 2,900 migrants were rescued Wednesday in the Channel of Sicily by the Italian Coast Guard, the Italian Navy, and by international ships operating under the EU rescue mission Triton.
Privately funded rescue vessels Phoenix and Dignity I also participated in various rescue missions.
More than 2000 deaths at sea this year
Thursday’s operations also yielded reports of dozens of deaths, either by drowning or asphyxiation, bringing this year’s fatalities to 2,432 for all sea-borne migrants bound for Europe.
Through this date in 2014, IOM’s Missing Migrants Project calculated there were 2,081 deaths at sea.
With four days remaining in the month, IOM calculates that in August, about 18,000 migrants have arrived in Italy from Libya. Around 400 migrants have perished on this route so far, which is fewer than the 474 IOM believes lost during the same period in 2014.
