CAIRO, Sept22:A boat carrying African migrants headed to Europe capsized off the Mediterranean coast near the Egyptian city of Alexandria on Wednesday, killing at least 42 people, Egyptian authorities said.
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Most of the survivors he has seen were Egyptian, he said, but he believes there were also people from Sudan and Somalia.
An initial breakdown of the nationalities of the migrants showed that they included 111 Egyptians, mostly teenagers and men in their 20s, said Sultan, the Beheira governor.
Map of Egypt locating Rosetta, the port near where a boat carrying migrants has capsized, with many drowned.
The tragedy comes months after the EU’s border agency Frontex warned that growing numbers of migrants bound for Europe were turning to Egypt as a departure point for the perilous sea journey. “The boat had more people than it could take”.
A member of the German NGO Jugend Rettet helps a refugee removing his life jacket after he was rescued from an overcrowded dinghy, during an operation in the Mediterranean Sea September 21, 2016.
Numerous survivors in the latest incident have been detained by police. Thousands of illegal migrants have made the unsafe sea voyage across the Mediterranean in recent years, fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East. Egypt has in recent months seen an uptick in the number of migrant boats leaving its Mediterranean shores. “On the boat there is a hold used to store fish”.
The four suspects are accused of involuntary manslaughter and human trafficking, the officials said.
Last week, the country’s navy thwarted two attempts by people trying to cross from Egypt to Europe.
Some teenage Egyptian survivors, huddled together in the basement of a police station, told the BBC they were trying to reach Italy to find work. “The number of boat crossings from Egypt to Italy has reached 1,000 (so far) this year”. The number is down from 520,000 in the first nine months of 2015. “The boat tilted and the migrants fell into the water”, a senior security official in Beheira told Reuters.
Despite the lower numbers attempting the risky sea crossing, fatality rates had risen, with 2016 on track to be “the deadliest year on record in the Mediterranean Sea”, said the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR).
European Union border agency Frontex says more than 12,000 migrants arrived in Italy from Egypt between January and September, compared with 7,000 over the same period in 2015.
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Some 1.3 million migrants reached Europe’s shores previous year fleeing war and economic hardship, prompting bitter rows among states over how to share responsibility.
