Libya recovered 105 bodies after
a boat packed with migrants sank in the Mediterranean Sea and said
almost 100 more people were missing and feared dead.
The vessel sank on Thursday after leaving Zuwara,
a major launchpad for smugglers shipping migrants to Italy by
exploiting a security vacuum in Libya where rival governments are
fighting for control four years after the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi.
Lacking
navy ships, Libyan officials were searching for survivors with fishing
boats and inflatables provided by locals. About 198 people had been
rescued by noon, officials said.
"The boat was in a bad condition and people died with us," said Ayman Talaal,
a Syrian survivor, standing next to his daughter. "We have been forced
into this route. It's now called the grave of the Mediterranean Sea."
Local
officials and residents were putting bodies into red bags on a beach
littered with shoes, trousers and other personal items from drowned
migrants. A blue inflatable brought in more bodies.
"We, the Red Crescent, work with nothing. Some fishermen help us with a boat," said Ibrahim al-Attoushi, an official at the Red Crescent in Zuwara. "We only have one ambulance car."
Lawless
Libya has turned into a major transit route for migrants fleeing
conflict and poverty to make it to Europe. Cross-border smuggler
networks exploit the country's chaos to bring Syrians into Libya via
Egypt or nationals of sub-Saharan countries via Niger, Sudan and Chad.
The
migrants pay thousands of dollars for the land and sea passage with
smugglers often beating and torturing them to press for more money for
the final leg of the trip by sea in unseaworthy vessels, rights groups
say.
Libyan officials brought 147 survivors to a
detention facility for illegal migrants in Sabratha, west of Tripoli, a
Libyan security official said, asking not to be named.
"We
have not received a request for help," said a spokesman for the Italian
coast guard, which has been coordinating rescue operations with the
European Union off the Libyan coast.
About 100
angry Zuwara residents took to the town's main square on Thursday when
news of the sinking spread, demanding that authorities stop human
traffickers, witnesses said.
Libya has asked the
European Union for help to train and equip its navy which was largely
destroyed during the uprising in 2011 that toppled Gaddafi.
But
all training and cooperation was frozen in 2014 as the European Union
boycotted a self-declared government controlling western Libya, which
seized the capital Tripoli a year ago by expelling the official premier
to the east.
Western and most Arab powers only
deal with the eastern-based government, which has no control of western
Libya from were boats are launched due to its proximity to the Italian
island of Lampedusa.
The United Nations has been
hosting peace talks between the two administrations to form a unity
government but a Tripoli based rival parliament, riddled with divisions,
refused to sign a preliminary agreement last month.
The
number of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean to reach
Europe has passed 300,000 this year, up from 219,000 in the whole of
2014, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said on Friday.
More
than 2,500 people have died making the crossing this year, not
including those feared drowned off Libya in the last 24 hours, it said.
That compares with 3,500 who died or went missing in the Mediterranean
in 2014.
Libya has been struggling to cope with
the influx of migrants, putting them in overcrowded makeshift detention
facilities such as schools or military barracks where they live in poor
conditions lacking medical care.
