Apr 1, 2009 - Strong winds and a leaky hull caused a panic aboard an overcrowded ship that capsized in the seas off of Libya on Monday, and more than 230 of the 257 Europe-bound migrants aboard are presumed dead, officials from the International Organization for Migration said Wednesday.
The 20 survivors, interviewed by the organization at an assessment center outside of Tripoli, the Libyan capital, on Wednesday, said they had clung to the hull in the roiling sea for eight hours after the boat overturned.
Jemini Pandya, a spokeswoman for the organization in Geneva, said that only one woman of the 70 who had been aboard the ship was among the survivors. The two children aboard also drowned. The search for additional survivors was called off Tuesday. The captain, an Egyptian, was also presumed drowned.
“As usual, the ship wasn’t seaworthy, and there were no life jackets were on board, and it was overloaded,” Ms. Pandya said.
Every year, tens of thousands of poverty-stricken people try to cross from Libya to Italy — a favored destination for migrants seeking to circumvent European immigration restrictions, often via a small Italian island called Lampedusa between the coasts of North Africa and Sicily.
According to the International Organization for Migration, some 32,000 people crossed from North Africa to Lampedusa in 2008. Libya has become a collecting point for illegal immigrants who try to save money there to buy a place on a smuggler’s boat to Europe. In February, Italy and Libya signed an accord that was supposed to stem the flow.
The survivors recounted how their ship was nine miles west of Tripoli when it started out an hour before dawn. At 8 a.m., the boat began to leak, and most of the migrants rushed to one side of the boat, causing it to capsize, Ms. Pandya said they told interviewers.
Libyan authorities, with the assistance of an Italian fishing boat, found the capsized ship about 4 p.m. and transported the survivors back to Libya. At the assessment center in Libya, the survivors were being treated for kidney conditions related to the intake of significant amounts of sea water, but were generally in good health, Ms. Pandya said.
Some 100 bodies had been found by Libyan authorities, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported Wednesday.
The passengers were from Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, Gambia, Senegal, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, said Laurence Hart, the chief of mission for the organization in Libya.
A second ship carrying 356 migrants was rescued by Libyan authorities on Monday with the help of Italian workers in an off-shore oil field about 18 miles from the Libyan coast, Mr. Hart said. The organization had no official word on the fate of another two ships with which radio contact had been lost. Reuters reported that the ships, which may have also been carrying migrants, had reached the shore of Italy and Malta.
The passengers on the rescued ship were being held at special centers in the towns of Tripoli and Grabouli, and said they had paid smugglers hundreds of dollars per person for passage to Lampedusa, the United Nations reported.
The Mediterranean crossing spans a divide between the poverty of the developing world and the perceived riches of lands to the north. Once they have landed in the European Union, migrants may travel with ease among the 15 so-called Schengen states — those of the union’s 27 member nations that operating under an agreement that permits travelers to cross borders without identity papers.
Even as European economies shrink because of the global recession, the number of would-be migrants is unlikely to ease since their own homelands are also blighted by the economic slump.
In recent years, many poorly equipped and overcrowded vessels operated by human smugglers have been reported missing in the Mediterranean with their human cargo lost or subsequently rescued..
According to the United Nations, more than 36,000 people arrived in Italy by sea from North Africa in 2008. Some 75 percent of them applied for asylum and about 50 percent of those received some form of international protection from the Italian authorities.
Source: New York Times (USA)
 

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