JEDDAH: Forty-one migrants drowned after their flimsy metal boat overturned in the Mediterranean between Tunisia and the Italian island of Lampedusa, the four survivors of the shipwreck told authorities on Wednesday.
The vessel had set off on Aug. 3 from the port city of Sfax, but capsized and sank during the night after being hit by a large wave. The survivors — a 13-year-old boy, a woman and two men, from Ivory Coast and Guinea — clung on to life jackets and other inflatable devices until they found another empty boat at sea, on which they spent several days adrift without food or drinking water.
They were rescued by a merchant vessel on Tuesday before being transferred to an Italian coastguard vessel, and arrived in Lampedusa on Wednesday.
Flavio Di Giacomo of the International Organization for Migration said the migrants’ boat would have been ill-equipped for the bad weather in the Central Mediterranean in the past week.
“Sub-Saharan migrants leaving from Tunisia are forced to use these low-cost iron boats that break after 20 or 30 hours of navigation,” he said.
“With this kind of sea, these boats capsize easily. It is very likely that there are many more shipwrecks than those we know about — that is the real fear.”
People traffickers who sent migrants to sea in such conditions were “more criminal than usual ... totally without scruples,” he said.
Provincial chief of police Emanuele Ricifari said the traffickers would have known bad weather was forecast.“Whoever allowed or forced the migrants to leave with this sea is an unscrupulous criminal lunatic,” he said.
The central Mediterranean is one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes. More than 22,000 people have died or gone missing there since 2014 and more than 1,800 people have died attempting the route so far this year — more than double the number in the same period last year.
Nevertheless, the tiny island of Lampedusa, about 145 kilometers, from Tunisia, is still the first port of call for many migrants heading from North Africa to Europe. Almost 94,000 migrants have landed on Italy’s shores so far this year, up from almost 45,000 in the same period last year.
The latest tragedy is one of several recent deadly incidents during bad weather in the Mediterranean.Authorities said on Monday that 16 migrants had died in shipwrecks off the coasts of Tunisia and Western Sahara. On Sunday, the International Organization for Migration said at least 30 people were missing after two shipwrecks off Lampedusa.
