This is a locator map for Libya with its capital, Tripoli.

AP

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AP

This is a locator map for Libya with its capital, Tripoli.

AP

CAIRO — A ship carrying dozens of Europe-bound migrants capsized off the coast of Libya, leaving greater than 60 folks — together with girls and youngsters — useless, the U.N. migration company stated.

Saturday’s shipwreck was the most recent tragedy on this a part of the Mediterranean Sea, a key harmful route for migrants searching for a greater life in Europe, the place, in response to officers, 1000’s have died.

The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration stated in a press release the boat was carrying 86 migrants when sturdy waves swamped it off the city of Zuwara on Libya’s western coast and that 61 migrants drowned, citing survivors of the “dramatic shipwreck.”

“The central Mediterranean continues to be one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes,” the company wrote on social media platform X, previously referred to as Twitter.

Libya has lately emerged because the dominant transit level for migrants fleeing battle and poverty in Africa and the Middle East. The North African nation has plunged into chaos following a NATO-backed rebellion that toppled and killed longtime autocrat Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.

The nation is a significant launching level for migrants making an attempt to achieve the European shores by the lethal central Mediterranean. More than 2,250 folks died on this route this 12 months, in response to Flavio Di Giacomo, an IOM spokesperson.

It’s “a dramatic figure which demonstrates that unfortunately not enough is being done to save lives at sea,” Di Giacomo wrote on X.

Human traffickers lately have benefited from the chaos in Libya, smuggling in migrants throughout the nation’s prolonged borders, which it shares with six nations. The migrants are crowded into ill-equipped vessels, together with rubber boats, and set off on dangerous sea voyages.

Those who’re intercepted and returned to Libya are held in government-run detention facilities rife with abuses, together with pressured labor, beatings, rapes and torture — practices that quantity to crimes towards humanity, in response to U.N.-commissioned investigators.

The abuse usually accompanies makes an attempt to extort cash from the households of these held, earlier than the imprisoned migrants are allowed to depart Libya on traffickers’ boats to Europe.