A Libyan coastguard official said on Friday a boat carrying
170 illegal migrants from sub-Saharan Africa was feared lost at sea off the
capital Tripoli.
“We are looking for 170 African passengers on a wooden boat
that has foundered off the Guarakouzi area” some 60 kilometres (35 miles) east
of Tripoli, coastguard official Abdellatif Mohammed Ibrahim told AFP.
“A few miles off the coast, we found the remains of a wooden
boat which had had some 200 migrants on board,” he said.
“We managed to save 16 people and recovered 15 bodies, but
the search continues for some 170 people who disappeared at sea,” Ibrahim told
AFP.
He said the coastguard was lacking in resources, and had
only one patrol boat to search for the missing people.
An AFP journalist reported seeing the body of a child who
was nevertheless wearing a life-jacket.
The coastguard official was unable to give any firm details
of the nationalities of the victims or survivors, but added: “It seems that
among them are Somalis and Eritreans.”
On Thursday, Tunisian fishermen rescued 75 migrants who had
been drifting at sea for five days after leaving Libya aboard an inflatable in
an attempt to reach Italy.
The migrants were in a state of extreme fatigue by the time
they made landfall in Zarzis, in southern Tunisia, where emergency services
took charge of them, an AFP correspondent reported.
Earlier this month, Tunisian coastguards intercepted 90
African migrants whose makeshift boat heading from Libya for the Italian island
of Lampedusa broke down off Zarzis.
Would-be immigrants often attempt the crossing from Libya or
Tunisia to Lampedusa in rickety boats.
On August 12, EU border agency Frontex said the number of
boat migrants arriving in Italy soared 500 percent in the first half of the
year, already topping a 2011 record during the Arab Spring uprisings.
The Warsaw-based agency said 78,300 people had arrived in
the European Union by the end of July via the hazardous Mediterranean route
from Libya to mainly Italy, but also Malta.
“Libya is highly unstable as it is now, and that means that
the people-smuggling networks are flourishing,” Frontex spokeswoman Izabella
Cooper told AFP.
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