The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has warned of the dangerous situation of a boat in distress with 500 migrants on board, adrift for two days in the Central Mediterranean, and of which track has been lost. In it are at least 45 women, some of them pregnant, and 56 children, one of them born during the journey. This was reported by the same passengers to the Alarm Phone assistance service, which receives calls from migrants in distress.
“500 people on board a boat with a damaged engine in the Maltese SAR zone. Given the lack of intervention by the maritime authorities, the Life Support ship of the NGO Emergency is looking for the vessel,” said the spokesman for the Mediterranean of the United Nations agency, Flavio Di Giacomo.
After neither the Italian nor the Maltese authorities have come to the rescue of the boat, the NGO Emergency has been trying to locate it for two days. They lost the trail this Wednesday afternoon. The humanitarian organization assures in a statement that they have asked the competent authorities of Malta and Italy to help them coordinate the rescue but “they have refused to share any information.”
Other NGOs are looking for them. Sea Watch has tried to find them for two consecutive days by flying over the area without finding any sign of the vessel. In addition to Life Support, the Ocean Viking has patrolled the area, but has also found no sign of a shipwreck. One hypothesis, considers Emergency, could be that the ship’s engine had started up again and they were sailing towards Sicily, but they have “no evidence” of this.
According to Alarm Phone warned two days ago, in their call the passengers told them that they had been sailing for several days after leaving Libya and their engine had stopped working. They claimed that a large amount of water had entered the lower deck of the boat. The head of mission on board Life Support, Albert Mayordomo, warns that when some people arrive they could be “at sea, in a state of unconsciousness or, in the worst case, already dead.”
Italy has been experiencing enormous migratory pressure for months. Although departures have decreased in recent days due to bad weather, in the first three months of 2023 almost 28,000 irregular crossings have been detected in the Central Mediterranean, triple that of the same period last year. In March alone, some 13,200 people reached Europe via this route, the majority coming from the Ivory Coast, Guinea and Pakistan.
