A 17-year-old Eritrean, Mohammed Ali Imam, who arrived five days ago in another rescue, said one of the survivors told him that the second boat started taking on water when the first boat ran out of fuel.
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Spindler reiterated UNHCR’s appeal to the European Union to allow for more legal pathways for refugees to reach Europe, and said it was “shameful” that the bloc had resettled fewer than 2,000 people under a plan announced past year to resettle 160,000.
It said 2510 migrants have died in the Mediterranean this year, 655 more than in the same period last year.
‘They would be economic migrants when they set out but once they arrive, they are victims of trafficking in Europe and deserve protection, ‘ he said.
The International Organization for Migration, citing what could be a record weekly death toll on the Mediterranean by its count, said Tuesday that 62 people were confirmed dead and another 971 were missing and presumed dead in nine separate deadly emergencies since May 25 on the Libya-to-Italy sea route.
“If we do not want to see such pictures, we have to stop producing them”, said Sea-Watch in a statement it released with the photograph on Monday.
A rescuer from the humanitarian organisation Sea-Watch holds a drowned migrant baby off the Libyan cost on May 27, 2016.
IOM spokesman Joel Millman said up until last week, only 13 migrant crossing deaths had been recorded in May in the southern Mediterranean.
“The odds of being among the dead are now one in 81”, said William Spindler, spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
At the same time some 204,000 migrants and refugees have crossed the Mediterranean to the continent since January, a figure that has also climbed acutely. “Eight others were reported separately to have been lost overboard from another boat, and four deaths were reported after fire aboard another”.
Frederico Soda, who heads IOM’s Mediterranean office in Rome, said the increase in those making the deadly crossing was due “in part, to better weather, and in part to the use of bigger wooden boats that can carry more people than the rubber boats” used a year ago. Until Thursday’s capsizing, he said, he had never heard of smugglers using an overloaded boat carrying hundreds of people to tow another vessel that had no engine and was packed with hundreds more.
Millman said traffickers could also be cutting fare prices to draw new migrants, mostly from elsewhere in Africa. Far fewer people attempt the longer and rougher journey, yet many more die trying.
Most the migrants making this journey are from Nigeria and Gambia, as most Syrians, Afghans, and Iraqis continue to take the Turkey-Greece route, according to the UNHCR.
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Italian police have arrested 16 people suspected of trafficking migrants across the Mediterranean from Libya after a week in which thousands were rescued and hundreds drowned trying to make the journey.
