Forty-three people died when a boat reportedly carrying almost 600 migrants capsized off Egypt’s coast on Wednesday (September 21), according to local officials.
The boat sank in the Mediterranean Sea off Burg Rashid, a village in the northern Beheira province. Local officials in the area said 31 bodies had been found, 20 men, 10 women and one child. A Reuters correspondent later saw a fishing boat bring in 12 more bodies, bringing the total so far to 43.
Dozens of family members of the victims gathered at a coast guard checkpoint anxiously awaiting news of missing relatives. Officials said the boat had been carrying Egyptian, Sudanese, Eritrean and Somali migrants.
A senior security official in Beheira told Reuters that initial information indicated the boat sank because it was carrying beyond it’s capacity. According to the official, the boat tilted and the migrants fell into the water.
Some of the survivors were taken to a nearby hospital and handcuffed to their beds while receiving medical attention.
One survivor, Ahmed Mohamed Darwish said they called for help when it was clear the boat was going to sink, but no help came.
“Around dawn, we told the captain of the ship that this boat wasn’t going to make it. It was rocking really hard when it was hitting small waves and we hadn’t gone that far in yet, so we thought, what will happen when we reach open water? So the captain tried to steer it and it almost toppled, and then he decided he wasn’t going to make the journey with this boat, and we all agreed and had faith that he would save us. We called the police but they didn’t show up,” he said.
Abdelrahman al-Mohamady, a fisherman who used his boat to search for survivors, said the Egyptian coast guard showed up hours after the accident happened.
“Nobody came. We returned 91 people, including a Syrian woman who died, whom picked up out of the water. We didn’t see anyone (officials). Anyone who was saved here, was saved by the fishermen boats. The coast guard arrived in the afternoon, after 5pm. The families of the migrants have been here since dawn, if the general in charge had called the navy then, none of them would have died,” he said.
In a statement posted on social media, Egypt’s military spokesperson said the Egyptian coast guard had saved 163 people, and recovered 43 bodies.
It was not immediately clear where the boat had been heading.
“I’m waiting for my cousin. We ran to tell the (coast guard) that the boat was sinking and the people were dying. But they do not care for the people who died, the country we live in looks to these people as dogs, not human beings, because if they had treated them like human beings, the navy would have been informed and not so many people would have died. But, what is it to them but some dogs who died, this isn’t our country. This is not our country,” said Shaabaan Darwish.
More and more people have been trying to cross to Italy from the African coast over the summer months, particularly from Libya, where people-traffickers operate with relative impunity, but also from Egypt.
More than 2,800 deaths were recorded between January and June, compared with 1,838 during the same period last year.
World leaders, including Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, gathered in New York this week at the United Nations General Assembly to discuss the migrant crisis.
(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2016