GENEVA — The deaths of up to 500 migrants and refugees in an intentional boat-ramming in the Mediterranean Sea last week could be an act of mass murder, the UN rights chief said Friday, calling for nations to properly investigate the event.
Up to 500 Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians, and Sudanese migrant workers and refugees were aboard the boat that left from the Egyptian port of Damietta and are feared dead at the hands of human traffickers who rammed and sank the boat off the Malta coast.
‘‘The callous act of deliberately ramming a boat full of hundreds of defenseless people is a crime that must not go unpunished,’’ UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad al-Hussein Zeid said in a statement. ‘‘If the survivors’ accounts are indeed true — and they appear all too credible — we are looking at what amounts to mass murder in the Mediterranean.’’
Advertisement
According to survivors interviewed by staff from the International Organization for Migration, there could have been 100 children under the age of 10 aboard the boat, among several hundred people crammed into a lower deck, while a couple of hundred more were on a top deck exposed to the sun.
The International Organization for Migration said the smugglers charged up to $4,000 apiece to board the overcrowded, creaky boat, and then forced them to switch boats in mid-sea numerous times.
‘‘All countries would throw the full weight of their police forces and justice systems behind an investigation if the victims were their own citizens and were killed by criminal gangs on their own soil,’’ Zeid said. ‘‘The reaction should not be any less rigorous just because the victims are foreigners and the crime took place on the high seas.’’
All of the witnesses said that the smugglers were Egyptian or Palestinian. Zeid urged the Greek, Maltese, and Italian authorities to share information on the identity of the smugglers with Egyptian authorities, who should launch a thorough investigation.
Advertisement