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As many as 1,200 refugees from Libya have gone missing and are presumably dead on their way to Europe through the Mediterranean, the Geneva based United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said Friday. The death toll represents a miserable ratio of one in ten, if compared with the total number of more than 12,000 refugees who have managed to land in the closest shores of Europe, including Malta and the southern Italian island of Lampedusa, UNHCR spokesperson Melissa Fleming told the press. A boat carrying 72 refugees, among them women and children, were reportedly in distress at sea after leaving the Libyan city of Tripoli for Lampedusa. 63 out of the 72 people on board died agonizing deaths after their boat ran out of fuel and went into drift at sea for over two weeks while passing vessels and helicopters allegedly failed to stop and rescue the boat people. The British newspaper "the Guardian," after investigation, accused NATO vessels, in particular the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle of deliberately ignoring the distress signals from the troubled refugee boat. NATO and the French naval authorities all denied the accusation. According to a UNHCR interview on Thursday with three survivors from the boat, military vessels had twice passed their boat without stopping. The first boat refused their request to board while the second only took photos. Records by the UN Refugee Agency show that during the two weeks at sea, drinking water and food soon ran out on the boat and people started eating toothpaste and drinking seawater and even their own urine. "People died every day from dehydration, sunstroke, hunger ... We kept the bodies for one or two days (before pushing them overboard), hoping to reach a coast and give them a proper burial. But sometimes we did not know if they were really dead or just in a coma," UNHCR quoted one of the young survivors named Bayisa as saying. UNHCR has appealed to European states to urgently put in place more reliable and effective mechanisms for rescue at sea on the Mediterranean. |
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