The boat was carrying Egyptian, Sudanese, Eritrean and Somali migrants, officials said. If the highest number is confirmed, then the incident will go down as one of the deadliest tragedies to take place on the migrant route across the Mediterranean. Panic spread as the boat tilted, casting people overboard. He did not say how the agency arrived at that figure.
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Though the death toll has now reached 42, the armed forces were able to rescue 163 people who had attempted to cross to Europe from Egypt, according to an official statement.
The Associated Press said at least 20 people were killed. He said 157 people were rescued.
The Egyptian Army has said that it was “an illegal immigration attempt”.
The boat is said to have capsized after a final group of some 150 people were crammed on board. The estimates came from UNHCR’s contacts with Egyptian authorities. He identified the skipper of the fishing boat as Mohammed Abu Hamid.
The head of the local council in the area, Ali Abdel-Sattar, said that the currents have carried the bodies of the victims many kilometers away from the site of the sinking.
A boat carrying 600 people from Egypt, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan capsized off the Egyptian coast yesterday killing 43 people.
“Families know that they will not be sent back”, leading boys as young as 12 to make the trip, Di Giacomo said. “Those are dead, for sure”. “They paid money to go and die”, he said.
CNN reports that four crew members, including the ship’s owner, were arrested on Thursday, and detained on suspicions of “human trafficking and involuntary manslaughter”.
An initial breakdown of the nationalities of the migrants showed that they included 111 Egyptians, mostly teenagers and men in their 20s, said Sultan. He also added that “70% of those coming to Italy come from sub-Saharan Africa”.
More than a million migrants entered Europe a year ago, many of them fleeing conflict and poverty in countries including Syria, Iraq and Eritrea.
More than 300,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean so far this year from various points of departure, the United Nations said this week.
More than 60,000 migrants and refugees are stranded in transit in Greece just across the Mediterranean from Egypt and those who arrived after March 20 have been restricted to five Aegean islands under an EU-brokered deal to deport them back to Turkey.
In June, a boat capsized near Sicily, leaving at least 169 migrants dead. He said he was among around 100 people in a hold used to store fish when the vessel capsized.
“There is no way to end this except by uprooting its causes; and this will be by reaching political agreements, not by closing borders”, he said. Salem is a faculty of commerce graduate who recently concluded his mandatory military service and trd to apply for many jobs to no avail. “It’s a wooden boat”, he said.
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“I am not going to leave until I see Mohamed”, Ratiba Ghonim told Reuters, as she mourned her 16-year-old brother.
