‘No more excuses’, EU warns member nations

More than 700 people were feared dead after a fishing boat crammed with migrants seeking a better life in Europe capsized off Libya on Sunday, with some survivors suggesting nearly 1,000 could have been on board. 

As EU foreign and interiors met to discuss their response to the worsening crisis, the International Organisation for Migration said it had received a distress call from another boat in the Mediterranean carrying more than 300 people, with at least 20 reported dead. “The caller said that there are over 300 people on his boat and it is already sinking (and) he has already reported fatalities, 20 at least,” the IOM’s Federico Soda wrote in an email. Soda said the IOM had given the Italian coast guard the coordinates for that and two other distressed vessels, but that they were still tied up with the earlier shipwreck. Arriving for the ministerial talks in Luxembourg, Mogherini said the 28-nation bloc “has no more excuses, the member states have no more excuses”. 

Italian and Maltese navy boats continued to scour waters off Libya for the victims of Sunday’s disaster, the latest in a string of shipwrecks, which have claimed well over 1,000 lives since the start of 2015. But the outlook appeared grim, with only 28 survivors rescued so far, along with 24 bodies.

At least three people, including a child, died when a boat carrying more than 80 migrants sank off the Greek island of Rhodes on Monday, police said. The sailing boat carrying the migrants ran aground on rocks off the Aegean island on a crossing from Turkey, said a police spokesman. Most of the survivors had to be pulled from the sea, and police fear the death toll could yet grow as they try to determine how many people were on board. Of those rescued, “57 are safe and sound and 23 were taken to hospital in Rhodes,” he said. 

There has been a surge in migrants trying to reach Greece’s Aegean islands from the Turkish coast in the last 10 days. More than 700 migrants arrived on the island of Lesbos last week. Greece’s radical left government appealed to local authorities last week to help accommodate the latest wave of refugees. Greece lacks the means to adequately cope with the growing number of migrants landing on its shores and crossing its borders, most of them en route to northern Europe.