The Egyptian Mediterranean coastline has been one of the main departure points for migrant boats.
Advertisement
Survivors said that overcrowding caused the boat to capsize.
The UNHCR estimated that the boat was packed with some 450 people, while the state news agency MENA said earlier that the number might be as high as 600.
The incident came as the EU’s border agency warned that increasing numbers of Europe-bound migrants are using Egypt as a departure point.
On Thursday, Egyptian prosecutors ordered the arrest and detention of the four crew members for four days pending investigation over charges of human trafficking, wrongful death, wrongful injury and using a fishing boat for another goal.
The UN refugee agency said on Friday that more than 4,600 non-Egyptians, many of them Sudanese and Ethiopians, had been arrested this year trying to depart from Egypt’s northern coast.
International Organization for Migration (IOM) spokesman Joel Millman says its count includes at least 51 people who died following a boat capsizing off Rosetta, Egypt, this week.
Relatives filled a pier just outside the town, crowding around the ambulances in an attempt to identify the bodies.
Survivors and relatives said the boat sank more than seven miles from the Egyptian coast and it took the coastguard around six hours to reach them.
At Rosetta General Hospital, Abdel Raouf Mustafa Abdel Garih, father of a still-missing migrant, spoke late Thursday about his son: “a young man, who was 23 years old, he left on the basis that he would go work there, and the boat never came back, and we don’t know where he’s headed now”. Rescue workers and fishermen said they had rescued at least 169 people, but confusion remained over how many might still be missing.
Traffickers often use barely seaworthy vessels and overload them to extract the maximum money in fares from desperate migrants.
Frontex chief Fabrice Leggeri said in June that the crossing from Egypt to Italy, which often takes more than 10 days, was becoming increasingly popular. More than a million crossed in all of 2015, but the rate of deaths is far higher this year.
Advertisement
Illegal migration via Egyptian Mediterranean Sea shores rose over the past few years in attempts to flee hard economic conditions in the most populous Arab country.
