About 20 corpses have been spotted at sea following the sinking of a migrant boat off the coast of Libya, an official from a European Union naval mission in the Mediterranean said Thursday.
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The European Union’s naval force confirmed that at least 15 to 20 people had drowned in one ship.
Commander Cosimo Nicastro suggested the total may be a record, although around 4,400 migrants were pulled from unseaworthy boats in the region in one day in August a year ago.
“We estimate the dead to be between 20 and 30 people”, Captain Antonello de Renzis Sonnino, spokesman for the EU Navfor Med operation to combat people smugglers in the region, told AFP news agency, as the rescue continued.
The Italian navy rescued 562 migrants from a capsized boat on Wednesday.
“Usually nobody really knows the exact number of people on a boat like that”, she said by telephone on Thursday. The Vega recovered 45 bodies and is still searching for the missing, the navy said, marking the third straight day of reports of migrant deaths at sea.
In the past two years, an estimated 7,000 have died in the Mediterranean as they tried to reach Europe.
The smugglers took advantage of a spell of calm seas and warm weather in the Mediterranean waters between their base in Libya and Italy.
Italian navy ship Vega recovered 45 bodies near a sinking rubber vessel close to Libya on Friday.
In all, the Italian coast guard rescued 2,600 migrants on Thursday alone, it said in a tweet (in Italian).
Italy’s coastguard declined to estimate how many may have died. A statement from the Italian navy Wednesday says the Bettica patrol ship was responding to a migrant ship in distress when it flipped, sending migrants into the sea.
That’s despite a drop of 9 per cent in the number of sea arrivals in Italy this year compared to 2015.
A note on terminology: The BBC uses the term migrant to refer to all people on the move who have yet to complete the legal process of claiming asylum.
Meanwhile, Greek authorities said Thursday that they have completed the evacuation of Idomeni, the country’s biggest informal refugee and migrant camp on the Macedonian border.
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“The people below can’t see nothing, can’t see nothing, but when they heard, they started coming up.They wanted to be saved, too”.
