New shipwreck of migrants in the Mediterranean: 41 missing including three children

Forty-one people, including three children, are missing after the sinking of a boat that left Sfax in Tunisia on Thursday with 45 migrants on board, the UN in Italy announced on Wednesday on the basis of testimonies from four survivors. . The United Nations agencies for refugees (UNHCR), children (UNICEF) and migration (IOM) deplore in a joint press release this “terrible shipwreck which occurred between Thursday August 3 and Friday August 4 in the Mediterranean”.

“The iron boat would have turned around” in the face of “weather conditions making crossings on these small iron boats unsuitable for sailing very dangerous”, according to the press release. “This demonstrates the absolute lack of scruples of traffickers who, in this way, expose migrants and refugees to very high risks of death at sea”, denounced the three agencies.

More than 1,800 people have died in the Mediterranean since January

According to figures compiled by the United Nations, more than 1,800 people have already died since January in shipwrecks in the central Mediterranean, the deadliest migration route in the world. That’s more than double last year. After drifting for days, the four survivors – a 13-year-old unaccompanied minor, a woman and two men – were finally rescued by a merchant ship on Tuesday and disembarked on the small Italian island of Lampedusa, located between Tunisia and Sicily has become, because of this location, the preferred gateway for migrants going to Europe.

In good health, the four survivors, from Guinea and Ivory Coast, said they survived by floating on inner tubes, according to the Italian Red Cross, which runs the migrant reception center in Lampedusa. Frontex, the EU border agency, for its part said that one of its planes had spotted Tuesday morning “a metal boat with four people on board” in waters under Libyan jurisdiction. The boat being “adrift”, Frontex raised the alarm and the four passengers were rescued by a merchant ship and then handed over to an Italian coastguard boat.

“Unscrupulous traffickers”

According to the survivors, the seven-meter-long metal boat overturned due to a large wave, throwing all its passengers into the sea. Only 15 of them had life jackets but still probably drowned . Faced with this umpteenth tragedy, the three UN agencies “reaffirm the need for coordinated search and rescue mechanisms and continue to ask States to increase resources and capacities to effectively meet their responsibilities”.

“The sea is very rough (…) Embarking migrants by this sea is really criminal. The traffickers are really unscrupulous”, denounced Wednesday the press officer of the IOM in Italy, Flavio Di Giacomo, questioned by the AFP. “The iron boats that are used are the most fragile I have ever seen in the central Mediterranean”, he observed, but “sub-Saharan migrants are forced to use these low-cost iron boats which break after 20-30 hours of navigation”. “With these conditions at sea, this type of boat capsizes easily,” he said. Therefore, “it is very likely that there will be many more shipwrecks than those of which we are aware, that is my real fear”, concluded Mr. Di Giacomo.

A hypothesis supported by the increase in the number of dead bodies found at sea on the migratory route between Tunisia and Italy. Nearly 94,000 migrants have arrived on the Italian coasts since the beginning of the year, more than double than during the same period last year, according to figures published by the Ministry of the Interior.