After a major increase in the number of migrant boats entering the Mediterranean from North Africa, support service Alert Phone reported on Sunday that a vessel with over 400 people on board is drifting between Greece and Malta and is taking in water.
Alarm Phone said on Twitter that they had received a call from the yacht that left Tobruk, Libya, overnight and that they had contacted the appropriate authorities. But, they noted, officials had not yet conducted a rescue operation.
The yacht was now in the Maltese Search and Rescue region, according to the alarm phone (SAR).
German NGO Sea-Watch International tweeted that it had discovered the boat and two commercial ships nearby.
It claimed that one of the ships had only been requested to provide fuel and that the Maltese authorities had instructed the ships not to conduct a rescue.
Maltese officials could not be reached for comment right away.
Those on board were reportedly panicked, and some of them needed medical assistance, according to Alarm Phone. They said that the skipper had fled and that no one was left to control the boat since it was out of gasoline and had a full bottom deck.
At least 23 migrants perished in a separate shipwreck overnight in the Mediterranean, according to a different Organization, Germany’s Resqship, on Sunday.
When it was informed that roughly 20 additional individuals had already perished, the Charity claimed on Twitter that it discovered 25 people in the sea during a rescue operation and that its personnel was able to collect 22 survivors and two corpses.
After a challenging 11-hour operation in choppy waters, the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) charity’s Geo Barents vessel this week successfully rescued 440 migrants off the coast of Malta.
Four people lost their lives and at least 23 were still missing on Saturday when the two boats carrying African migrants that they were travelling in capsized off Tunisia on their way to Italy.
(Reuters)
