REGGIO CALABRIA, Italy // The European Union was accused of putting thousands of migrants at risk on Wednesday by scrapping rescue operations in the Mediterranean as Italian coastguards said no more survivors have been found from a shipwreck that may have claimed 400 lives.
Amnesty International accused Europe of “turning its back on its responsibilities and clearly threatening thousands of lives” by forcing Italy to abandon its Mare Nostrum rescue mission last year in favour of the surveillance patrols currently being carried out by the EU’s borders agency, Frontex.
Jean-François Dubost, Amnesty’s displaced persons director in Paris, said the latest tragedy highlighted the “horror of nothing having been sorted out in the Mediterranean.”
“In demanding an end to the Mare Nostrum rescue operation that saved 170,000 lives, and replacing it will a surveillance mission, the EU has turned its back on its responsibilities and clearly threatens thousands of lives,” he added.
Italian coastguards said on Wednesday that no more survivors had been found from the latest migrant boat to sink. They confirmed that 145 people had been saved from the sunken boat, while nine bodies had been found.
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Coastguard spokesman Commander Filippo Marini said he could not exclude that more lives had been lost, and that the kind of vessel from which the 145 people were rescued usually carried many more people. Search operations were continuing in the area on Wednesday.
The vessel capsized off the Libyan coast on Sunday, with survivors who were brought to Italy telling charity workers that as many as 400 others perished.
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which has interviewed some of the survivors, between 500 and 550 people were crammed onto the vessel at the time.
In a tragic twist, the boat appears to have overturned because of excitement caused by the sighting of rescuers.
IOM spokesman Flavio Di Giacomo said that even before the latest sinking, more than 500 migrants had died so far this year trying to cross to Europe – ten times the toll over the same period last year. Many of the dead were refugees who had been fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan,
On Sunday and Monday alone, Italian coastguards intercepted 42 boats carrying 6,500 migrants attempting to make the hazardous crossing to Europe.
Amnesty’s Mr Dubost criticised the limits placed on the Triton maritime policing operation set up by Brussels in November to replace the more humanitarian Mare Nostrum mission, which was run solely by the Italian navy for more than a year.
“Only a rescue operation coordinated at a European level can respond to the immediate challenges we face to stop people drowning. There is no other possible solution to the problem,” he said.
Recent good weather has prompted a spike in the number of migrants attempting to reach Italy aboard boats, many of them overcrowded and unseaworthy.
An increasingly violent and chaotic situation in Libya has also added to the problem, with unpoliced ports giving people smugglers a free hand.
* Agence France-Presse