2023-06-24 00:22:22
Dozens of migrants are missing after a boat capsized on Thursday off the Italian island of Lampedusa, a spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (Acnur), Chiara Cardoletti, told AFP on Friday. This is a new tragedy that adds to those that occurred in a few days in Italy, Greece and Spain.
Among the missing there is at least one newborn, the spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (Acnur) in Italy, Chiara Cardoletti, told AFP. The ship, which set sail from Sfax, Tunisia, was carrying 46 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa (Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso and Cameroon), said a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Flavio Di Giacomo.
Due to unfavorable weather conditions of wind and strong waves, the iron boat capsized. “Some survivors were transported to Lampedusa and others to Tunis,” Di Giacomo said. “Among the missing are seven women and a minor. The survivors are all adult men,” he added.
The spokesman stressed the fragility of iron boats, poorly welded, which sink at the first breakdown. “There are certain shipwrecks that we are not aware of,” Di Giacomo lamented, asking for “European ship patrols to monitor the Tunisian route as well as the Libyan route. “Otherwise we will witness a disaster this summer,” he warned..
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This week, more than 1,100 migrants and refugees have arrived in just over 24 hours on the Italian island of Lampedusa, where the reception facilities have once again exceeded their limits, unable to absorb the flow of boats registered since the weekend.
On Sunday, the Italian authorities registered more than 540 arrivals, while this Monday morning another 560 have been added. In total, the island has received more than twenty boats during this time, according to the time.news news agency.
So far this year, Italy has received more than 57,000 migrants and refugees, compared to 24,000 for the same period in 2022, reports the Ministry of the Interior. Giorgia Meloni’s government has advocated limiting this flow, with calls for European solidarity and measures against NGOs that carry out search and rescue work.
And in the midst of all this tragedy, what happened on June 14 has not yet been forgotten. In the Ionian Sea, about 80 kilometers from the Greek city of Pylos, in the south of the country, an old fishing boat set sail from eastern Libya with around 750 people on board, of which only 104 could be saved. 82 were recovered. corpses, so the number of missing would exceed 550, making it the second shipwreck with the highest number of deaths in recent years in the Mediterranean Sea after the one that occurred in April 2015 in the Sicilian Channel, when some 900 people died.
At least 1,064 people have died in the waters of the central Mediterranean, according to estimates by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which puts more than 21,300 victims registered since 2014 in this same area.
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