On tuesday, Libyan coastguards picked up nearly 300 migrants from three boats, including 16 clinging to a sinking dinghy. Survivors from a boat informed that about 50 people who had embarked with them were feared dead, while the coastguard said the number of missing might be as high as 100.“We found the migrant boat at about 10 o’clock this morning. It had sunk and we found 16 migrants. The rest were all missing and, unfortunately, we didn’t find any bodies or [other] survivors,” said Nasr al-Qamoudi, a coastguard commander. Some of the survivors, who were brought back to a naval base in Tripoli, said there were originally about 70 people on board the boat when it set off near the town of Khoms.
Gatti said the man told them he had worked as a nurse in three hospitals in Libya after fleeing the Syrian war in hopes of reaching his Palestinian girlfriend who lives in Sweden. The man lived inside the hospital, unlike most of the hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and other refugees who are kept in miserable conditions in Libyan detention facilities until they can secure passage aboard a smugglers’ boat toward Europe. He rarely left the hospital. He said there was a hunt on for Syrians, since they are believed to have more money [than other migrants] or do better paid work,” Gatti said.