One hundred and sixty-two bodies have been found after a boat carrying hundreds of migrants capsized off an Egyptian coastal town this week, a provincial official said on Friday.
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The boat capsized approximately 12 nautical miles from the Egyptian port city of Rosetta.
Eighteen more bodies were retrieved Friday afternoon, bringing the number of victims to 162, the governor of the Delta Beheira province, Mohamed Sultan, said on Friday. The military said it had rescued 163 survivors.
The boat was transporting Egyptian, Syrian, Sudanese, Eritrean and Somali migrants.
Witnesses spoke of the harrowing moment their vessel keeled over due to overcrowding, as well as the agonising hours-long wait for help to arrive.
It is unclear where the boat was headed, but officials said it was heading for Italy.
The report said those rescued were 121 Egyptians, including four crew members, and 43 foreign migrants.
Many of those who survived found themselves detained by Egyptian law enforcement once on land, with some being handcuffed to their hospital beds. One said, “We didn’t know how to pull them out”.
Survivors said that overcrowding caused the boat to capsize.
The EU’s border agency Frontex has warned that the sea crossing from Egypt to Italy was becoming increasingly popular.
Egypt has been a traditional route for migrants travelling to Europe by sea.
Egypt has become a more common launching point for illegal immigration through its Mediterranean Sea shores to Europe after Libya and Turkey lost their importance for smugglers in favor of the most populous Arab country, said experts of Egyptian and Middle East affairs.
The UN’s migration monitor said the death toll among people trying to reach Europe by the Mediterranean this year has passed 3,500 and is “rapidly approaching” the record level set last year.
The figure is down from the 520,000 that made the journey in the first nine months of previous year.
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Despite the lower numbers attempting the unsafe sea crossing, fatality rates have risen, with 2016 on track to be “the deadliest year on record in the Mediterranean Sea”, said the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR). Rescue workers carry the body of a victim on a stretcher after a boat carrying migrants capsized off Egypt’s coast, in Al-Beheira, Egypt, September 22, 2016.
