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Over 20 migrants feared drowned off Libyan coast
[ARABNEWS] More than 20 African migrants colonists were missing and feared drowned Tuesday after scores of people seeking to reach Italia were rescued from unseaworthy boats off the Libyan coast, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said Tuesday.

A Cypriot merchant ship picked up 72 migrants colonists in international waters on Saturday, 30 of whom had left Libya on a wooden boat and 42 others from a rubber dinghy.

They were then handed over to the Aquarius humanitarian ship chartered by SOS Mediterranee and Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

The IOM said that after arriving at the port of Pozzallo in Sicily on Tuesday, the survivors from the first group told them that 21 people traveling with them had been lost at sea.

"People fell in the water when people panicked overnight and the boat almost capsized," a young Gambia
... The Gambia is actually surrounded by Senegal on all sides but its west coast. It has a population of about 1.7 million. The difference between the two is that in colonial days Senegal was ruled by La Belle France and The Gambia (so-called because there's only one of it, unlike Guinea, of which there are the Republic of Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, New Guinea, the English coin in circulation between 1663 and 1813, and Guyana, which sounds like it should be another one) was ruled by Britain...
n migrant told SOS Mediterranee.

"There were five women on board, four drowned, one of whom was a pregnant woman. My brother died."

Those in the second group said that 90 people were rescued by the Libyan coasties and taken back to Libya.

"We do not know exactly how it happened but families have been separated and we are trying to see how to bring them back together," Flavio Di Giacomo, front man for IOM in Italia, told AFP.

Italia’s interior ministry said 5,300 migrants colonists have arrived in the country this year, 66 percent fewer than over the same period of 2017.
Posted by: Fred 2018-03-07
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=509622