The boat was carrying 64 migrants and was intercepted Friday off the northwestern town of Sirte, according to the town’s coast guard unit. It posted images on Facebook showing dozens of migrants, including at least one woman and a child, upon their return. The coast guard also set the migrant boat on fire, a procedure aimed at preventing its reuse by traffickers.
On Wednesday, a boat carrying 32 migrants from Egypt and Syria capsized off Libya’s eastern town of Tobruk, leaving 22 missing and presumed dead. The Libyan coast guard said it rescued nine people and recovered one body.
Libya, which has borders with six nations and a longshore on the Mediterranean, plunged into chaos following a NATO-backed uprising that toppled and killed longtime autocrat Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. Since then, the oil-rich country has emerged as the dominant transit point for migrants fleeing war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East and seeking better lives in Europe.
Human traffickers in recent years have benefited from the disorder in Libya, smuggling in migrants across the country’s lengthy borders. The migrants are crowded onto ill-equipped vessels, including rubber boats, and set off on risky sea voyages to Europe.
According to the International Organization for Migration’s missing migrants project, at least 434 were reported dead and 611 missing off Libya between January and August this year while more than 14,100 migrants were intercepted and brought back to shore.
The intercepted migrants are held in government-run detention centers rife with abuses, including forced labor, beatings, rapes and torture — practices that amount to crimes against humanity, according to UN-commissioned investigators. The abuse often accompanies attempts to extort money from the families of the imprisoned migrants before releasing them or allowing them to leave Libya on traffickers’ boats to Europe.Italy’s coast guard recovered six bodies off the coast of Sicily, believed to be some of the 21 missing from a migrant shipwreck earlier this month, Italian media reported on Sunday.
The Italian coast guard said on Wednesday that seven people, all male Syrian nationals, were picked up from a semi-sunken boat southwest of the island of Lampedusa after a shipwreck.
The survivors told rescuers they had set off from Libya on Sept. 1 and that 21 of the 28 people on board, including three children, had fallen into the sea in rough weather.
Italian news agency AGI reported that rescuers believe the six bodies are some of the 21 missing from the shipwreck, based on the coordinates of where they were found.
The central Mediterranean is among the world’s deadliest migration routes. According to the UN migration agency (IOM), more than 2,500 migrants died or went missing attempting the crossing last year, and 1,116 since the beginning of the year.
The latest figures from the Italian interior ministry recorded that just over 43,000 migrants had reached Italy so far in 2024, well down from previous years.
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda said “very many” immigrants come to Europe expecting a free ride, in an interview aired Sunday on a US political affairs programme.
The comment comes against a background of Warsaw’s accusations against Moscow that it has tried to smuggle thousands of people from Africa into Europe by flying them to Russia and sending them to the Polish border via Belarus.
“If someone comes over to Poland in the false perception that one will stay here and get everything for free and will have a better life without working, well, we do not agree to such arrivals,” said Duda.
He was speaking to conservative news host Sharyl Attkisson on Sinclair Television’s “Full Measure” programme.
Asked by Attkisson whether great numbers of people were coming to Europe expecting a free ride, Duda said “yes”.
“I think that in very many cases, we have such a situation. That’s why there is such a reaction in the West of Europe,” he added.
The interview was also available online on the programme’s website.
Since summer 2021, thousands of migrants and refugees, mainly from the Middle East, have crossed or attempted to cross the border between Belarus — an ally of Russia — and Poland, a NATO and EU member.
In May, Warsaw announced it would spend more than 2.3 billion euros ($2.5 billion) on fortifying its eastern border with Belarus that it said Russia has used to destabilise the region with hybrid attacks.
The following month, a Polish soldier on patrol at the border was fatally stabbed through a five-metre-high (16-foot) metal fence that Poland had erected in 2022.
The Polish army also reported other attacks on troops at the border.
In July, Polish lawmakers voted to allow the security forces to use lethal weapons in response to active threats, including at the tense border with Belarus.
