bdmetronews Desk ॥ The bodies of 162 people had been pulled from the waters off the Egyptian coast by Friday, two days after a boat carrying hundreds of migrants capsized in the Mediterranean while attempting to head to Europe.
Dozens more are feared dead, said Mohammed Sultan, the governor of Beheira, who provided The Associated Press with the latest figures. He also said that the search operation is still ongoing. Many of them are believed to be children and women who were unable to swim away when the boat sank.
Pictures posted on social networking sites showed dozens of bodies lined up in black plastic bags, and others floating near wooden fishing boats. Videos showed that some fishermen were using nets to bring up the bodies.
In one video, a fisherman was heard shouting into his mobile phone that, “the sea is littered with bodies.”
Many of those gathered at the shore where the bodies arrived appeared to be wearing surgical masks to protect them from the smell of decaying bodies. Some brought chunks of ice to be placed on the bodies to prevent them from decomposing.
Authorities have struggled to give accurate figures for the number of people on board the capsized vessel. The U.N. Refugee Agency, UNHCR, estimated that the boat was packed with some 450 people, while the state news agency MENA said earlier that the number might be as high as 600.
The boat was located nearly 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) from the Nile Delta port city of Rosetta when it sank. It had waited at sea for many hours — perhaps days — for smaller wooden boats carrying migrants to arrive from different points along the Egyptian coastline.
The Egyptian news portal, Al-Youm al-Sabei, published interviews with several survivors who said that before their journey the migrants had been “stored” for several days in chicken farms by the traffickers to evade police. Some of the interviewees said the traffickers asked for $6250 per family, to be given on arrival in Italy.
After his release, survivor Ahmed Darwish said, “my advice is that no one should undertake this risk, and especially anyone who saw these things, they will never do it again.”
The International Organization for Migration has said that this year over 3,500 have died while attempting to cross the Mediterranean to Europe, with this number “rapidly approaching” the record death toll set last year.
Those who chose to risk the dangerous journey are often fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and elsewhere.
