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| Mediterranean sinking kills 200 migrants bound for Europe | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| More than 200 migrants are dead after the motorboats they were travelling on sank in the Mediterranean Sea, the UN's refugee agency says. | |
| "Nine were saved after four days at sea. The other 203 were swallowed by the waves," UNHCR's spokeswoman in Italy, Carlotta Sami, said on Twitter. | "Nine were saved after four days at sea. The other 203 were swallowed by the waves," UNHCR's spokeswoman in Italy, Carlotta Sami, said on Twitter. |
| She called the situation a "horrible and enormous tragedy". | She called the situation a "horrible and enormous tragedy". |
| On Monday, at least 29 migrants died after the inflatable boat carrying them overturned in high seas. | |
| Seven were already dead when they were picked up near the Italian island of Lampedusa, and a further 22 succumbed to hypothermia after spending more than 18 hours on the open deck of the vessel which picked them up. | |
| The International Organization for Migration says the two boats involved in the latest tragedy had departed from the Libyan coast on Saturday. | |
| The IOM says that each boat was carrying more than 100 people when they capsized, probably on Monday. | |
| The nine survivors all speak French, and are believed to be from West Africa. | |
| Matthew Price, BBC News, Italy | |
| There is no way of knowing for sure whether these 203 men, women, and presumably children, would have been saved if the former Italian search-and-rescue operation known as Mare Nostrum was still running. | |
| But having spent a week on board an Italian navy frigate, I can be sure they would have done their utmost to save as many lives as possible. | |
| The EU's Triton border patrol is not designed to do that. It cannot pre-empt trouble in international waters - it can only act when lives are immediately at risk. | |
| The Italian operation was set up differently. The naval crews knew they had one single purpose - to prevent death. Some time back, EU leaders pledged that not a single life would again be lost as a result of these large scale tragedies at sea. | |
| Italy launched its Mare Nostrum search-and-rescue mission in October 2013, in response to a tragedy off Lampedusa in which 366 people died. | |
| The aim of the mission was to look for ships carrying migrants that may have run into trouble off the Libyan coast, but was disbanded after a year. | |
| The European Union now runs a border control operation, called Triton, with fewer ships and a much smaller area of operations. | |
| Human rights groups had warned the authorities that closing Mare Nostrum would endanger lives. | |
| The mayor of Lampedusa, Giusi Nicolini, has been critical of the new system, saying: "Triton is not Mare Nostrum". |