“The command centre coordinated 40 rescue operations” that included vessels from Italy, as well as the EU’s border agency Frontex, and “saved 6,500 migrants”, the coastguard wrote on Twitter.
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The rescue operations, which also involved European Union border agency Frontext and NGOs Proactiva Open Arms and Doctors Without Borders, took place some 20km from the Libyan town of Sabratha.
Migrants fleeing Libya on board of a dinghy wait to be rescued by emergency teams, as they were sailing at the Mediterranean sea toward the Italian coasts, about 17 miles north of Sabratha, Libya, Sunday, Aug. 28, 2016. Amongst the survivors were two 5-day-old twins, who were rescued from a wooden boat alongside their mother.
The IOM says there are a further 275,000 in Libya waiting to travel. They were the latest attempting to flee to Europe, driven by war and poverty, and exploited by human traffickers. Numerous refugees have used the Central Mediterranean route from Nigeria, Eritrea and Gambia with Libya as a transit point.
This month, an MSF ship taking part in migrant rescue operations came under attack from armed men who shot at the vessel before briefly climbing aboard, the medical charity said.
Speaking about the “particularly unseaworthy” nature of the boats carrying these migrants, he said the people smugglers, as they have all along, “been behaving abominably” (towards the migrants) and condemned their “cynical and brutal” behaviour. The numbers show that while arrivals this year are destined to be lower than the previous year, death among refugees stands at a much higher rate with this year’s toll just 1,000 shy of 2015’s death toll.
Overall, about 284,000 migrants have entered Europe so far this year through various transit routes across Africa, Asia or the Middle East.
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With migration routes through Turkey and the Balkans restricted, more and more people are trying the Mediterranean route between Libya and Italy.
