While the deal has made it harder for people to reach Greece, other routes to Europe exist – including from Libya.
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Survivors of a deadly shipwreck, Ismam Mowlid of Somalia (L) and Mahmud Muaz of Ethiopia deliver a press conference in Athens on April 21, 2016.
A witness to a refugee camp fire in northern Greece says the blaze was sparked by a woman trying to cook for her children inside her tent.
Migrants cross tracks at a railway station near a makeshift camp at the northern Greek border point of Idomeni, Greece, Wednesday, April 20, 2016.
The UN’s refugee agency believes as many as 500 people may have drowned in a shipwreck in the Mediterranean earlier this week, after their ship capsized somewhere between the coasts of Libya and Italy.
Word of another sea disaster involving migrants is coming out.
The survivors told agency staff they were part of a group of 100 to 200 people who left on a 90-foot boat from a place near Tobruk. The discrepancy in the accounts could not be immediately explained. They said they were on a boat carrying 200 people when it met a larger crowded vessel in the open sea, which sank as traffickers were moving people from their boat onto it.
The 41 survivors included those who had yet to be transferred from the small vessel, as well as a number of those who swam back to the smaller boat after the larger one began to sink.
The man’s wife, two-month-old child and brother-in-law drowned after the boat capsize. After the shipwreck we drifted at sea for a few days, without food, without anything, I think I was going to die. He said the travelers had meant to go to Italy, not Greece.
The details of the incident varied slightly in a report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The United Nations High Commission on Refugees said that the agency spoke to survivors of incident at sea, which occurred at an unknown site between Libya and Italy.
Aymo said the smugglers had told them the journey, for which each passenger paid $1,800, would be safe.
UNHCR visited the survivors at the local stadium of Kalamata where they have been temporarily housed by the local authorities while they undergo police procedures.
In October 2013, after at least 360 migrants died when their boat sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa, Italy launched an extensive search-and-rescue operation known as Mare Nostrum. Five died on the western route between Morocco and Spain this year, the group said. So far this year, about 25,000 migrants have arrived, an increase of 4.7 percent over the same period last year, according to Interior Ministry data.
The EU-Turkey arrangement does little to address the longer and more unsafe sea routes from Egypt and Libya.
Turkey, which borders Syria, is home to 2.7 million Syrian refugees. Human Rights Watch says the initial round of.
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UNHCR spokesperson William Spindler said the eyewitnesses estimated that up to 500 people might have perished.
