The EU Mediterranean rescue mission says it has located about 20 bodies in the seas off Libya’s coast after a migrant boat sank.
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They are piled onto flimsy rubber boats or old fishing vessels, and as dramatic images from the crew of the Italian Navy ship Bettica showed on Wednesday, they can be tossed into the water in a matter of seconds.
Migrants have been rescued off the coast of Libya on their way to Italy after their boat capsized.
A Spanish navy vessel of the Eunavfor Med Sophia operation picked up 77 people and was trying to recover “about 20 bodies”, a press officer for the mission, Rino Gentile, told dpa.
“Unfortunately there were bodies too”, de Renzis Sonnino said, adding that the rescue operation was still ongoing.
Reports indicated that the trawler overturned when people rushed to one side when they spotted a rescue ship.
New video footage shows an overcrowded fishing boat capsizing off the Libyan coast sending migrants tumbling into the sea.
A Luxembourg reconnaissance plane spotted the capsized boat on Thursday and raised the alert.
Greek police say the last 783 people were bused out of the tent city Thursday and taken to official shelters in other parts of northern Greece. Photos tweeted by the mission showed a bright blue dinghy submerged under the weight of migrants waving their arms in hope of rescue as an European Union aircraft flew overhead.
In the single deadliest migrant boat sinking since the crisis began, some 700 people died in April past year, also off the coast of the chaos-wracked north African country.
On Thursday, rescue teams saved some 4,000 people in 22 deployments. He said he had no details about the empty boats. The scene was some 30 miles (50 kilometers) off Libya’s coast.
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Italian Navy ship Vega plucked about 135 people off a “half-submerged” large rubber boat in one of 17 operations coordinated by the coastguard on Friday. Ali, who survived the capsizing of the vessel, said he found himself underneath the hull when the boat overturned, but somehow emerged and knew he survived when the “saw the sun”.
