By Libya Herald staff.
Tripoli, 30 May 2015:
In the last 48 hours, 4,260 migrants are known to have set off from the . . .[restrict]Libyan coast and seventeen of them didn’t make it. Their bodies were found aboard a drifting rubber raft.
In all, 22 rescues were made by British, German Italian and Irish warships as well as by cargo vessels. The calmer weather appears to have caused the people-traffickers to launch waves of over-crowded and generally unseaworthy craft toward the open sea.
The EU’ Operation Triton’s Rome-based maritime rescue co-ordination centre said that the migrants had been sailing in 13 wooden fishing boats and nine rubber rafts. It was on of of these rafts that the 17 dead were found. No details of this particular rescue have been released, so it is unclear if there were also survivors in craft.
Meanwhile the Egyptian authorities said today that they had arrested 51 people, including five Sudanese, attempting to enter Libya illegally at the Salloum border crossing. Frontier police say they are picking up around 3,000 illegal migrants a month but reckon that many more succeed in reaching Libya. In the last five days in two operations, 191 migrants, mostly Egyptians, were caught.
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