GENEVA (AP) – Up to 500 people are feared dead after a shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea last week, the U.N. refugee agency said Wednesday, citing the accounts of survivors.
The disaster happened in waters between Italy and Libya, based on accounts from 41 survivors who were rescued on April 16 by a merchant ship, UNHCR said. The agency said that if confirmed, it would be one of the deadliest tragedies on the Mediterranean in the last year.
The survivors said they had been among 100 to 200 people who left a town near Tobruk, Libya, on a smugglers’ boat last week. The agency said Wednesday that “after sailing for several hours, the smugglers in charge of the boat attempted to transfer the passengers to a larger ship carrying hundreds of people in terribly overcrowded conditions.”
“At one point during the transfer, the larger boat capsized and sank,” UNHCR said in a statement, saying that its staff had visited the survivors at a local stadium in Kalamata, Greece, where they have been housed by authorities while they undergo “police procedures.”
Barbara Molinario, a Rome-based spokeswoman for UNHCR, said details remained unclear and said its staffers didn’t want to press the survivors too hard “as they are still very tried by their experience.”