At least 240 migrants and refugees die in two shipwrecks off Libya – IOM

At least 240 migrants, believed to be from West Africa, have died in two shipwrecks off Libya, a spokesman for the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Thursday (November 3).

“Two rubber dinghies, which is what they are, rubber dinghies, packed with migrants, totalling over 300 we think in all, at least 300 people, have succumbed to the waves off Libya in very bad weather. So at least 240 migrants and refugees, asylum seekers have drowned, within sight of rescue vessels. There were attempts to rescue them by five ships, coordinated by the Italian coast guard, but tragically most people seem to have died, including infants,” IOM spokesman Leonard Doyle told Reuters TV during an interview in Geneva.

One group of migrants, including about 20 women and six children, set off in a rubber dinghy from Libya around 3 a.m. on Wednesday, but their boat collapsed after a few hours, said Flavio di Giacomo, another IOM spokesman, who cited accounts by survivors.

By the time rescuers arrived, most had drowned. Twelve bodies were recovered, including three babies. About 27 survived.

Another two women reported surviving a separate disaster that happened at about the same time. Their rubber dinghy was carrying about 130 people.

Doyle said smugglers used to make migrants cross from Libya to Europe on old, unusable fishing ships ready for the scrap heap, but have turned to more dangerous vessels because of anti-smuggling policies.

“It’s probably due to the success of the anti-smuggling efforts of the European navies. They’ve been capturing and destroying a lot of the fishing boats used to help migrants get to another place, so in the absence of those boats and with the migrants determined to leave, and the smugglers interested in making money off them, they’ve been putting them in completely unsafe rubber dinghies,” Doyle said.

Italy has become the main arrival point in Europe for people fleeing persecution and poverty in Africa, most of them crossing the Mediterranean from lawless Libya in search of a better life.

Unnerved by migrants surging through Italy into northern Europe, the European Union called in September 2015 for Italy and fellow frontier state Greece to set up “hotspots” to identify and fingerprint the migrants.

European law says migrants must stay in the country where they first enter the bloc, and that is determined by where they give their fingerprints. Until last year, most migrants refused to be identified and headed straight for the richer north.

According to the IOM the month of October saw a surge in migrant arrivals in Italy, with 27,388 arriving, more than the two previous Octobers combined, and bringing this year’s total arrivals to over 158,000.

Doyle said the latest deaths meant 4,220 lives had been lost in the Mediterranean so far this year, compared with 3,777 in the whole of 2015, according to the “Missing Migrants Project”.