DFA: No Filipinos on refugee ship that sank off Libya

MANILA, Philippines—There were no Filipinos on board an overcrowded refugee ship that broke apart Friday in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said.

Citing a report from the Philippine embassy in Tripoli, the DFA Tuesday said both the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) were “not aware of any Filipinos who had boarded the ship.”

A two-man DFA team based in Benghazi also reported to the home office that “during the most recent evacuation organized by the IOM in Misrata, even as IOM personnel went around the city urging people to evacuate, Filipinos did not board their ship.”

Only 41 Filipinos were still in Misrata, according to Foreign Assistant Secretary J. Eduardo Malaya, also the DFA spokesperson.

Quoting the DFA team, Malaya told the Philippine Daily Inquirer that “all remaining Filipinos in Misrata were now volunteers with the Red Crescent and at local hospitals.”

Malaya, also the ambassador-designate to Malaysia, said that “less than 2,000 Filipinos—1,600 of them nurses and their dependents—have opted to remain in Libya.”

Two months ago, the Philippine government chartered the Greek ferry, the MV Ionian Queen, to pick up Filipino evacuees in Benghazi.

On its first trip, over 1,200 Filipino workers boarded the vessel which took them to the Greek island of Crete from where they took flights to Manila.

On the second and last trip, less than 700 Filipinos got on the ship which has a capacity of 1,720 passengers.

The Associated Press, meanwhile, reported that aid officials were still trying to confirm the fate of the 600 passengers on the doomed vessel.

Witnesses who left the Libyan capital on another boat reported seeing remnants of the sunken ship and the bodies of passengers floating in the sea, an official of the UN High Commission for Refugees had told AP.

Other witnesses saw passengers swimming to shore but it was unclear how many survived, according to the IOM.

IOM staff on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa interviewed a Somali woman who said she lost her four-month-old baby in the sinking. The woman swam to shore and managed to board another boat headed to Italy, the IOM said in a statement Monday.

A Libyan government spokesperson in Tripoli had no comment Monday evening when asked about the ill-fated refugee ship.

At least three other ships that left Libya in late March had disappeared, with hundreds feared dead.

The number of people fleeing North Africa has soared since mid-January, after Tunisia overthrew its longtime dictator and set off the uprisings in Egypt and Libya.

Witnesses of Friday’s sinking said the Libyans continued to put people on the doomed ship, way more than they should have, according to AP.