As many as 500 migrants seeking a better future in Europe may have drowned last week in the Mediterranean Sea between Libya and Italy, UN refugee officials said Wednesday.
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The latest reported deaths come as Europe struggles to find a way of stemming the flow of people fleeing war, poverty and persecution in what has become the continent’s worst migrant crisis since World War II.
37 men, three women and a three-year-old child – were rescued by a merchant ship and taken to Kalamata, in the Peloponnese peninsula of Greece on April 16.
The survivors told the UNHCR they had been part of a group of between 100 and 200 who departed last week from near Tobruk in Libya on a 33-yard long boat.
The unidentified vessel sank while passengers traveling on a smaller boat were being transferred onto it, the agency said in an e-mailed statement. “This ship sank – with hundreds aboard”.
Exactly one year ago, an estimated 800 migrants drowned off the Libyan coast when the fishing boat they were travelling in collided with a mercantile vessel that was attempting to rescue them – the most deadly Mediterranean shipwreck in decades. They drifted at sea possibly for three days before being spotted and rescued, the agency said.
The survivors were then taken to Kalamata, Greece, where IOM and UNHCR staffers interviewed them. Although those numbers are slightly more than the 24,000 who arrived during the same period past year, the United Nations and other refugee organizations are expecting more people to take rickety boats plying the risky routes across the Mediterranean to Italy.
Earlier Wednesday, Human Rights Watch urged Turkey to allow Syrians displaced by government shelling to cross the border to safety.
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Last week, the rights group said Turkish border guards had shot at Syrians escaping an Islamic State offensive.
