Smugglers Rammed Migrants’ Boat, Sinking It, Group Says
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Version 0 of 1. GENEVA — Human traffickers rammed a boat filled with migrants they were smuggling from North Africa to Europe, making it sink in the open sea and “deliberately drowning” hundreds of the migrants, the International Organization for Migration said Monday. Christiane Berthiaume, a spokeswoman for the migration organization, said the traffickers rammed the boat with another vessel off the coast of Malta on Wednesday after an argument broke out between the traffickers and the migrant passengers. Ms. Berthiaume cited accounts by two Palestinians who had survived the sinking and had been rescued. Only nine people are known to have survived the disaster, the group said, out of as many as 500 who were said to have been on the boat. “If the survivors’ reports are confirmed, this will be the worst shipwreck of migrants in years,” Leonard Doyle, a spokesman for the organization, said in a statement. He said the sinking was “not an accidental tragedy, but the deliberate drowning of helpless migrants by the criminal smugglers who extort money from them for their desperate journeys.” The Italian authorities in Sicily, where some of the survivors were taken, confirmed that a criminal investigation of the shipwreck had begun, but refused to provide any details or otherwise comment. Another boat of Europe-bound migrants sank in recent days, off the coast of Libya, with as many as 250 passengers aboard, most of them feared dead, said the migration organization, based in Geneva. In all, as many as 700 people may have died in the past week, adding to what was already the worst year on record for the hazardous route. By the group’s tally, more than 2,900 are feared dead so far in 2014, compared with about 600 in all of 2013. The United Nations refugee agency is investigating reports of additional sinkings in recent days that may push the death toll higher. “Alarmingly, these two incidents look as if they are among four or five that have occurred in the last few days,” said Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The precise details of the confrontation and the sinking near Malta were not immediately clear. The boat that was reportedly rammed set out last week from an Egyptian port, Damietta, the migration organization said. Citing the accounts of the two Palestinian survivors, who were interviewed over the weekend, the organization said the smugglers ordered their human cargo to transfer to a smaller boat they were towing. The migrants refused to comply because of the dangerously small size of the second boat. The traffickers then rammed the boat carrying the migrants “in order to sink it,” Ms. Berthiaume said. The two Palestinian survivors are men from Gaza, the organization said, adding that they were plucked from the sea at different locations by an Italian commercial vessel nearly two days after the sinking. Ms. Berthiaume said they were taken to Pozzallo, a port in southern Sicily, and interviewed there by the Italian police and the migration organization, who agreed that their accounts were “precise and reliable.” The migrants on the boat were reportedly Palestinians, Sudanese and Egyptians. But there was little mention of the disaster in the Egyptian news media; only a few outlets made any note of it, and those few outlets published articles by international news agencies after deleting all references to Egypt. One of the Palestinian survivors recounted how he spent hours in the water with an Egyptian teenager who said he was trying to reach Europe to earn money to help pay for heart treatment for his father, Ms. Berthiaume reported, but the survivor said the boy succumbed to exhaustion and drowned. Eyad Bozum, a spokesman for the Gazan Interior Ministry, said Monday that 30 Palestinians from Gaza were on a migrant boat that sank, and that at least 15 were dead, but there was confusion about which ship they were on. Mr. Bozum said his ministry had been unable to obtain satisfactory responses from the Egyptian authorities so far, and did not have the names of the dead or missing or of survivors. The recent war between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that dominates Gaza, appears to have prompted a wave of attempts by Palestinians to reach Europe with the aid of Egyptian smugglers. One of those migrants was Mohammed Abu Tuaima, 20, a second-year law student from Abassan, a village east of Khan Younis, who told relatives that he saw no future in Gaza. His father, a retired Palestinian Authority police officer, said Mr. Tuaima entered Egypt through the Rafah crossing using a falsified medical referral and then headed for Alexandria with $3,500, most of which was to pay the smugglers. His relatives in Gaza last heard from him about 12:45 a.m. on Sept. 7. Now they are glued to the radio and television and scouring social media for any scraps of news about boat sinkings and what might have happened to him. In the sinking off Libya, coast guards reported over the weekend that they had rescued 26 people from a boat believed to have been carrying around 250 migrants when it went down. The latest deaths lent new urgency to the request last month by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for urgent action by European states to address the soaring death toll among migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean. This week, the high commissioner, António Guterres, and the actress Angelina Jolie met in Valletta, Malta, with three survivors of a boat sinking, according to a statement from Mr. Guterres’s office. It did not specify which sinking the three survived. |