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Ten migrants perished in Sunday and 56 are feared missing,
including children, after their boats sank off the Libyan coast while
trying to cross the Mediterranean, aid organizations said on Monday.
Inflatable boats loaded with men, women and children left
Garabulli, 50 kilometres east of Tripoli, on Friday night, but after
eight or nine hours it began to deflate and take on water.
Several people fell overboard, while others clung on to
what was left of the boats as the bodies of drowned victims floated in
the sea.
The Libyan navy and Italian coastguard rescued 290 people and recovered the bodies of six women and two men.
When the survivors arrived in Catania in Sicily on Monday,
they said the boat had left with 140 to 150 people on board, meaning
dozens were missing, including 15 women and six children aged two to
six, according to aid groups – the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and
Doctors without Borders (MSF).
Sixty-four people died, according to the IOM's Italian office.
"We saved 86 migrants," Maria Rita Agliozzo, an Order of Malta doctor on the Italian coastguard vessel, told Radio Radicale.
"We did many resuscitations. We resuscitated two children – a two-year-old and a three-year-old – and also a woman."
The IOM and UNHCR said the migrants came from The Gambia,
Guinea, Sierra Leone, Mali, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Cameroon and Nigeria.
The bodies of another two women were found on Sunday by the
Libyan navy, which had rescued 290 others from two boats in distress.
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