At least 50 migrants killed in boat crash near Libya

  10 January 2018    Read: 738
At least 50 migrants killed in boat crash near Libya
At least 50 migrants died as a result of a new boat crash off the Libyan coast, Tripoli Coast Guard said Tuesday.
The Libyan Coast Guard came to rescue three ships carrying up to 300 people, and by the time rescuers arrived, one of the boats had already sank, with only 16 of its passengers saved, the coast guard said as quoted by the Italian newspaper Repubblica. According to the survivors, at least 50 migrants drowned as a result of the crash.

"We found the migrants… Unfortunately, we could not find any body or other survivors," the coast guard commander Nasr al-Qamoud was quoted as saying.

According to the newspaper, the Libyan authorities managed to save about 700 people over the past three days. On Saturday, a rescue operation took place in the Mediterranean Sea after 64 people were killed in the first shipwreck of 2018.

Europe is experiencing the most serious migration since the Second World War, caused primarily by a number of armed conflicts and acute economic problems in the countries of Africa and the Middle East. Thanks to efforts to tackle the issue, the number of migrants that arrived in Italy decreased by 34 percent year-on-year in 2017 to 119,000 people.

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