A woman and a child were found dead on Wednesday aboard a makeshift boat in the Mediterranean Sea. At least 140 people are also still missing. In addition, 104 migrants were also intercepted by the Libyan coast guard and returned to Libya.
Wednesday, April 21 was dense in the Mediterranean Sea, off the Libyan coast, while the weather conditions were bad.
One hundred and four migrants, including 10 women and three children, were intercepted by the Libyan coast guard, transferred to the port of Tripoli and sent to a detention center. The castaways are from Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Sudan.
On board the overloaded canoe, two bodies were discovered by the authorities: that of a woman and a child. They were transferred to hospital for burial.
In addition, two other boats were still missing Thursday noon, tells InfoMigrants the platform to help migrants at sea, Alarm Phone. One, made up of about 100 people, is of particular concern to the organization, which lost contact with the castaways on Wednesday evening. “They were in a dire situation and the seas were very rough,” said a member of Alarm Phone, who hopes the castaways “survived the night.”
The Libyans did not go out to sea because of the bad weather
The second canoe in difficulty was carrying 42 people. The latter alerted Alarm Phone on Tuesday evening, after their engine stopped. The next morning, no help was given to them. Alarm Phone said on Twitter that the migrants were still at sea and that heavy waves were putting the boat in difficulty. The organization finally lost all contact with the boat on Wednesday afternoon.
Contacted by Alarm Phone, the Libyan authorities did not want to go to sea because of bad weather conditions. “We asked for an intervention all day and they refused,” said the platform on Twitter.
The Ocean Viking present in the search and rescue zone (SAR zone) as well as three merchant ships were still, Thursday, in search of these two boats “in an increasingly rough sea without any coordination of the maritime authorities”, reports on his Twitter page SOS Mediterranean – which charters the humanitarian ship.
