Twenty-five young Egyptian illegal migrants drowned in the
Mediterranean Sea on Thursday en route to Europe, security sources in
Sharqiya said on Thursday.
The majority of the deceased resided in Belbais, Sharqiya governorate, the sources said.
The families of the victims called on Persident Abdel Fattah
al-Sisi and the interior minister to recover the bodies from the sea.
The tragedy follows a bigger incident last week, in which some 500
illegal emigrants drowned in the Mediterranean while attempting to cross
to Europe.The dead were from Egypt, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan.
According to UN officials, the mass drowning occured when human
traffickers attempted to cram more people onto an already crowded boat.
Survivors said they started their journey in Libya and were heading for
Italy.
News of the disaster emerged on the first anniversary of one of the
worst disasters in the Mediterranean, when an estimated 800 migrants
drowned off the Libyan coast after the fishing boat they were sailing in
collided with a mercantile vessel that had been attempting to rescue
them.Some 150,000 migrants reached Italy by boat in 2015, the vast
majority sailing from Libya. So far this year, about 25,000 migrants
have arrived, an increase of 4.7 percent over the same period last year,
according to Interior Ministry data.
Source: cctv-africa.com
No comments:
Post a Comment
Add a Comment...