ISLAMABAD: At least 16 Pakistanis were among 65 illegal migrants who died after their Europe-bound boat capsized off Zawiya in northwestern Libya over the weekend.
PM Shehbaz Sharif directed the foreign affairs ministry Tuesday to expedite the identification of the deceased. The ministry said its embassy in Tripoli had “dispatched a team” to a local hospital at the site near Marsa Dela port for the identification.
Late Tuesday, the ministry disclosed that of the 63 Pakistanis on the boat, the bodies of 16 had been fished out and 37 rescued, while 10 were still missing. “Three of the survivors are in Tripoli, being looked after by the (Pakistani) embassy,” the ministry said in a statement.
The tragedy unfolded less than a month after 50 Pakistanis died when a boat with 86 migrants to Europe capsized off Morocco on January 16. Before that, at least 300 Pakistanis had drowned in a migrant boat that sank off Greece in June 2023, with Italy their intended destination.
In a travel alert, Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has identified Libya as one of 15 transit countries used for human trafficking.
Each year, thousands of Pakistanis pay traffickers large sums for risky and illegal journeys to Europe, hoping to find work and send money back to their families. Many also take these perilous routes to escape conflicts and religious persecution.
Pakistani authorities claim human smugglers send migrants seeking illegal entry into Europe to Libya, located around 300km from Italy. From there, they either take them by boat to Europe or relocate them to the coastal cities of Morocco and Mauritania in west Africa.
On Monday, UN’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said it was “deeply alarmed” by the dozens of migrants’ bodies found in mass graves in southeastern Libya. Two days back, Libyan authorities claimed they had found the bodies of 28 sub-Saharan migrants in the southeastern district of Kufra, near a site where they were allegedly detained and tortured.
The UN agency expressed shock at the discovery of two mass graves in Libya with bodies of dozens of migrants, some with gunshot wounds. The circumstances of the migrants’ death and nationalities remain unknown, it said, adding the graves were discovered following a police raid during which hundreds of migrants were rescued from traffickers.