Migrant boat sinks near Libya; 14 dead

ROME — A boat crowded with migrants sank Monday in the Mediterranean just beyond Libya’s territorial waters, leaving at least 14 people dead, said the Italian navy, which helped rescue more than 200 survivors.

A tugboat that was traveling between oil platforms in the area spotted the vessel in difficulty and was the first to the rescue when the migrant boat overturned and then sank, said a navy spokesman, Capt. Marco Maccaroni.

“The tugboat estimated that there were about 200 on board when it saw it before it sank,” Maccaroni said. Seas were calm at the time, and it was unclear what caused the boat to go down, Maccaroni said. But he added that often when migrants see another vessel nearby, “they all move to one side, causing their boat to tip over.”

By nightfall, 206 people had been rescued, the navy official said. He said it wasn’t clear whether any people were missing because the exact number of migrants who set out on the boat wasn’t known.

Nationalities of the survivors and dead hadn’t yet been determined.

The sinking occurred about 100 miles south of the tiny Sicilian island of Lampedusa and about 40 miles north of the Libyan coast, Italian authorities said. An Italian frigate and a patrol boat rushed to the scene along with two Italian coast guard boats and a boat from the Italian border police fleet. Several cargo vessels in the vicinity also joined in the rescue efforts.

The sinking is the latest in a string of tragedies in the Mediterranean sea involving migrants who embark on perilous journeys in overloaded or unseaworthy boats.

At least 232 people died in the fiery capsizing of a smuggler’s trawler near Lampedusa last fall. Only 155 people survived that accident.

In the past week alone, more than 4,000 migrants have reached Italy’s shores, arriving in smugglers’ boats. Many of the boats set out from Libya’s loosely patrolled coast with migrants who are fleeing wars or hardship in Syria, Eritrea and elsewhere. Italy said it can no longer afford the costs of rescuing, feeding and sheltering the steady stream of arrivals and wants the rest of the European Union to do more to help. But northern neighbors such as Germany say they already take in far more asylum seekers than Italy does.

The EU’s home affairs commissioner, Cecilia Malmstroem, expressed shock over the “appalling loss of life” in Monday’s tragedy and offered thanks to Italian authorities for their rescue efforts. She called on member states to “now show concrete solidarity in order to reduce the risk of such tragedies from happening again.”

She pushed for implementation of an EU strategy to resettle “refugees directly from the camps outside the EU” as well as “opening new legal channels to come legally.”

“By bringing these people safely to the EU, we could prevent them from falling in the hands of traffickers and smugglers,” Malmstroem said.

In Libya on Monday, the country’s naval force rescued 450 migrants, including Eritreans, Syrians and Palestinians, off its coastline, officials said. On Sunday, Libyan officials said they found the bodies of 24 migrants after the bottom of the victims’ small boat collapsed.

Just two days before, Libya’s interior minister threatened that his country would aid migrants in reaching Europe if the EU didn’t send more money to help it deal with those using Libya as a transit point.

Information for this article was contributed by Esam Mohammed and Raf Casert of The Associated Press.

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