More than 80 migrants have gone missing and only four were
rescued after their boat capsized off Tunisia crossing the Mediterranean from
Libya to Italy, Tunisia's coast guard said Thursday.
A Malian survivor, still in a state of shock, said their
inflatable sank on Monday, Wajdi Ben Mhamed, an official of the International
Organisation for Migration (IOM), said after meeting the man in his 20s
He said the boat, with 86 people on board, started to leak
and tipped over only hours after setting out to sea from the Libyan town of
Zuwara, west of Tripoli, as passengers switched to one side of the vessel.
"We spent two days like that, clinging to a piece of
wood," the Malian told the IOM representative for southern Tunisia.
"He doesn't know what happened to the others. They're
missing and there's a high probability that they drowned," Ben Mhamed
said.
The Red Crescent and the navy told AFP that three Malians
and an Ivorian were rescued off Zarzis in southern Tunisia on Wednesday by the
coast guard who had been alerted by local fishermen.
The Ivorian, however, died in hospital and one of the
Malians has also been hospitalised in intensive care.
"About 80 migrants are feared dead. More updates are
needed in order to confirm what happened and the actual number of
missing," Flavio Di Giacomo, an IOM spokesman, tweeted.
Libya, which has been wracked by chaos since the 2011
uprising that killed veteran dictator Moamer Kadhafi, has long been a major
transit route for migrants, especially from sub-Saharan Africa, desperate to
reach Europe.
On Tuesday night, 44 migrants were killed in an air strike
on their detention centre in a Tripoli suburb.
No comments:
Post a Comment