New York, US (BBN)-More than 700 migrants have been killed in shipwreck disasters in under a week – including 550 on a boat with no engine which capsized off Italy as it was being towed by smugglers.
Hundreds drowned between Wednesday and Friday when their boats all overturned off southern Italy, according to the UN refugee agency, reports the Daily Mail.
This included 550 who are still missing after an overcrowded boat they were on capsized on Thursday morning.
Refugees said the boat, carrying about 670 people, did not have an engine and was being towed by another smuggling vessel before it overturned.
Just 25 people survived the disaster – 79 others were rescued by patrol boats and 15 bodies were recovered.
Carlotta Sami, spokeswoman for UNHCR, added that an estimated 100 people are still missing from a smugglers’ boat that was lost on Wednesday.
Sami says 45 more bodies were recovered from a shipwreck Friday and many more are reported missing.
It comes after it emerged that 668 migrants were saved from boats in distress in the Mediterranean off Libya on Saturday.
They were rescued by Italian coast guard and navy ships, aided by Irish and German vessels and humanitarian organisations, Italian and Irish officials said.
The rescues are the latest by a multi-national patrol south of Sicily that has saved thousands this week.
The Irish military said the vessel Le Roisin, deployed earlier this month in the humanitarian search and rescue mission, saved 123 migrants from a 12-metre-long dinghy and recovered a male body.
A German ship, part of the EU Navfor Med deployment on patrol for migrant smugglers’ boats, was also involved in what was a total of four separate rescue operations, the Italian coast guard said.
Meanwhile, with migrant shelters filling up in Sicily, the Italian navy vessel Vega headed toward Reggio Calabria, a southern Italian mainland port, taking 135 survivors, along with 45 bodies, from a rescue a day earlier.
The Vega was due to dock on Sunday.
Under a European Union deal, tens of thousands of those rescued at sea and seeking asylum were supposed to be relocated to other EU nations from Italy and Greece, whose shores have received most of the migrants in recent years.
But with resentment building in some European countries about taking in migrants, the plan never really took off, and only a small percentage have actually been moved.
At the Vatican on Saturday, Pope Francis told several hundred children, among them many migrants, who came from the Italian south to see him, that migrants ‘aren’t a danger but they are in danger’.
The pontiff held a red life vest, given to him recently by a volunteer, and told the children it was the vest used by a Syrian girl who died while trying to reach the Greek island of Lesbos. ‘She’s in heaven, she’s watching us,’ Francis told his young audience.
Among those in the audience was a Nigerian youth, who lost his parents in 2014 as the family tried to reach Italy by sea.
Francis has repeatedly expressed dismay that some European nations have refused to accept migrants fleeing poverty or war, and have even thrown up fences and other barriers to thwart the arrivals from journeying northward after reaching the continent’s southern shores.
BBN/SK/AD