Scores Missing after Libya Refugee Boat Capsizes
Scores of people were missing at sea on Wednesday after a tiny boat carrying more than 200 African migrants fleeing Libya capsized in the night amid three-meter-high waves, officials said.
Coast guard spokesman Vittorio Alessandro told Agence France Presse from the southern Italian island of Lampedusa that 48 survivors had been rescued and a helicopter crew aiding the high-seas rescue operation had spotted some 20 bodies near the boat.
"We are still hoping. Our boats and helicopters have thrown all sorts of lifejackets and lifeboats to allow people to hold on," Alessandro told AFP.
Around 130 people who were on the 13-meter boat are believed to be missing, while a fishing boat in the area rescued three more survivors.
The island state of Malta said it was helping to coordinate rescue efforts.
Helicopter pilots quoted by Italian news agency ANSA said they had seen "dozens" of corpses in the area including those of small children.
"We hoped one of them would raise their arm. But no-one did," one said.
Shaken-looking survivors wrapped in thermal blankets were helped off a coast guard boat on Lampedusa, television images showed. Some, including a heavily pregnant woman, were immediately taken to hospital in ambulances.
"The bad weather started at about six pm yesterday ... Our boat broke apart. We fell into the water. It was hell. There was water in my mouth but I managed to stay afloat," ANSA quoted a 29-year-old Cameroonian, Peter Ugo, as saying.
Michele Prosperi from the charity Save the Children who has been helping the thousands of migrants arriving on the island, said: "They were in very, very, very difficult conditions. They were all suffering from hypothermia."
Prosperi said there was one unaccompanied minor and they were all being put up in a former U.S. base on the island, which is nearer North Africa than mainland Italy and is a gateway for illegal immigration into Europe.
The International Organization for Migration, based in Geneva, said it estimated some 300 people were on the boat which capsized and sank in the early hours of the morning and that more than 250 were therefore missing.
"The survivors are all in a state of shock. One man told me he had lost his one-year-old son. One of the two surviving women told me how she had lost her husband," said the IOM's Simona Moscarelli, who is in Lampedusa.
The coast guard said in a statement that the boat had departed two days ago from the town of Zuwarah in western Libya near the border with Tunisia. The statement said the people on the boat were mostly Eritreans and Somalis.
Hundreds of African refugees from Libya -- many of them migrant workers stranded after the start of an uprising against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and the beginnings of a civil war -- have landed in Italy in recent days.
Mussie Zerai, an Eritrean Catholic priest based in the Vatican who has helped coordinate efforts to rescue some of the refugees in the past, criticized European authorities for failing to evacuate them.
"These deaths were avoidable if Europe had listened," Zerai told AFP.
"If Europe had acted, we wouldn't be counting bodies now. This is a real tragedy. There are entire families that are dying," he said.
"With all the ships deployed there, the Mediterranean is one of the most controlled seas. I don't understand how these things can happen," he added.
More than 20,000 migrants fleeing continuing unrest in Tunisia have also arrived on Lampedusa in recent weeks, sparking a humanitarian emergency.
Migrants and refugees often travel in rickety and overcrowded wooden fishing boats and there have already been smaller recent accidents at sea.
The accident happened some 40 nautical miles (74 kilometers) south of Lampedusa in waters that are under the jurisdiction of Malta.
Malta's coast guard said that it was first alerted to the presence of the boat just after midnight and had sent a plane and a boat to the area.
Alessandro said the boat was caught in high seas whipped up by strong winds and overturned after passengers panicked.
Because of the storm and the panic on board, "the boat capsized and the passengers were thrown into the sea," Alessandro said.
"The darkness and weather conditions made the search for the missing people difficult but it is still continuing," he said.
Source: Agence France Presse
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