Dozens feared drowned crossing Mediterranean from Libya, aid group says

Survivors rescued from a deflating rubber dinghy in the central Mediterranean Sea have reported that some 60 people who departed Libya with them a week ago perished during the journey, the humanitarian rescue group SOS Mediterranee said Thursday.

The European charity's ship Ocean Viking spotted the dinghy with 25 people on board Wednesday. Two were unconscious, and were evacuated by the Italian military for treatment. The other 23 were in serious condition, exhausted, dehydrated and with burns from fuel on board the boat.

"After yesterday's rescue of 25 people in very weak health condition, a medical evacuation took place in cooperation with the Italian Coast Guards," said SOS Mediterranee in an update shared Thursday on social media. The two unconscious people could not be roused by members of the rescue team and were flown by helicopter to Sicily, the group said.

SOS Mediterranee spokesperson Francesco Creazzo said that the survivors were all male, 12 of them minors with two of those not yet teenagers. They were from Senegal, Mali and The Gambia.

Creazzo said the survivors were traumatized and unable to give full accounts of what had transpired during the voyage. Humanitarian organizations often rely on accounts of survivors when pulling together the numbers of dead and missing at sea, presumed to have died.

The survivors' boat departed from Zawiya, Libya, seven days before the rescue, SOS Mediterranee said.

"Their engine broke after 3 days, leaving their boat lost adrift without water and food for days," the group shared in another social media post. Citing survivors, that update noted that "at least 60 people perished on the way, including women and at least one child."

The U.N. International Organization for Migration says 227 people have died along the perilous central Mediterranean route this year through March 11, not counting the new reported missing and presumed dead. That's out of a total 279 deaths in the Mediterranean since Jan. 1. A total of 19,562 people arrived in Italy using that route in the period.

Last year, about 100 migrants were rescued after a dangerously overcrowded fishing boat sunk in the Mediterranean near the coast of Greece. At least 82 people were killed and hundreds more were never found, according to officials. The tragedy shined a light on the notorious, risky journey across the Mediterranean that thousands of migrants undertake every month in hopes of reaching Europe. Tunisia and Libya are two main departure points.

In:
• Libya
• Migrants
• Mediterranean Sea