700 feared dead in migrant shipwreck in Mediterranean sea

mangaloretoday.com

Tripoli (Libya), 19 April 2015: In what could be the deadliest Mediterranean migrant disaster in the Mediterranean Sea hundreds of people are feared to have drowned after a boat carrying up to 700 migrants capsized in the sea near Lampedusa Island.

A major rescue operation is under way after the vessel carrying "between 500 and 700 migrants" capsized at midnight local time, south of the Italian island of Lampedusa. So far 28 people have been rescued.

 

 

 

Many thousands of others have risked their lives this year, fleeing conflict and instability in Africa and the Middle East, in small, often decrepit vessels in an attempt to reach European territories.

Earlier this week, four hundred people were feared to have drowned when their vessel capsized north of Libya.

Carlotta Sami, a spokeswoman for the UN’s refugee agency, told Italian media: "At the moment, we fear that this is a tragedy of really vast proportions."

Italian ships, the Maltese Navy and commercial vessels are all involved in the rescue operation in Libyan waters, 130 miles (210km) off the coast of Lampedusa and 17 miles (27km) from the Libyan coast.

The migrants reportedly fell overboard when they rushed to draw the attention of a passing merchant ship.

Mark Micallef, a journalist with the Times of Malta, told that such incidents were "not at all uncommon". Those rescued and the bodies recovered will be brought to the coastal city of Catania, Italian media report.

Some 10,000 migrants have been rescued in the past week by Italy’s coastguard, and the number of people making the crossing is expected to surge as weather conditions improve.

Aid organisations have called for a concerted international effort to put better search-and-rescue systems in place and for action to stem the unprecedented numbers of asylum seekers and migrants from Asia, the Middle East and Africa seeking to reach Europe.

 

Pope grieves the loss of 700 Libyan migrants in the Mediterranean boat accident

Pope Francis, speaking after some 700 migrants were feared dead in the Mediterranean, on Sunday appealed to the international community to take swift and decisive action to avoid more tragedies.

“They are men and women like us, our brothers seeking a better life, starving, persecuted, wounded,

exploited, victims of war. They were looking for a better life,” he told tens of thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square for his Sunday noon “Faced with such a tragedy, I express my most heartfelt pain and promise to remember the victims and their families in prayer,” he said, departing from his prepared text.

“I make a heartfelt appeal to the international community to react decisively and quickly to see to it that such tragedies are not repeated,” he said, before asking the crowd to pray “for these brothers and sisters”.

The latest disaster happened when a boat carrying migrants capsized off the Libyan coast overnight, in one of the worst disasters seen in the Mediterranean migrant crisis, officials said on Sunday.