File photo: Red Crescent workers are seen carrying the bodies of several migrants, who drowned while trying to reach Europe in November 2021 | Image@ Hamza Al Ahmar/Anadolu Agency/picture-alliance
Security patrols combing the coastline around Tobruk have recovered 11 more bodies since Sunday, bringing to 26 the number of migrants confirmed dead after a vessel sank off Libya’s eastern shore last week, medical and security sources said on Tuesday, with dozens still unaccounted for.
The boat, believed to have been carrying about 61 people, went down near Tobruk, a port city close to the Egyptian border that has become a recurring flashpoint in the Mediterranean migration crisis. Ten survivors were pulled to safety, but their accounts left a grim arithmetic: scores of passengers remain missing and feared dead.
The first wave of recoveries, 15 bodies, among them a girl, was made at various points along the Tobruk coastline in the days immediately following the capsize. The latest 11 victims were found after a woman’s body washed ashore on Sunday, prompting intensified beach patrols that authorities say will continue. “In anticipation of more bodies washing ashore, the security patrols are continuing to be carried out along the shores of Tobruk city,” a security source said.
Coast guard images showed members of the search and rescue department working alongside Red Crescent volunteers to retrieve the dead, wrapping each body in white cloth before loading them onto vehicles. The condition of the recovered remains left little time for formalities. A medical source described all the bodies as decomposed, with another adding that “all the bodies are buried on the same day or the day after the recovery due to bad odors and the disappearance of the bodies’ features.”
The latest tragedy is far from isolated. More than 800 migrants were reported dead or missing along the central Mediterranean route between January 1 and May 16 this year, according to the International Organization for Migration, a toll that follows more than 1,300 deaths or disappearances recorded on the same route last year. The IOM noted in early April that 2026 has already become the deadliest start to a year for Mediterranean crossings since 2014.
Human traffickers have exploited Libya’s instability, a consequence of the NATO-backed uprising that toppled longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, turning the country’s lengthy borders, shared with six nations, into corridors for smuggling migrants. Crammed onto overcrowded, ill-equipped boats, many of those making the crossing are sub-Saharan Africans fleeing conflict and poverty in hope of reaching Europe.
Libyan authorities have moved to prosecute some of those behind the smuggling networks. The Tripoli Criminal Court recently sentenced four members of a criminal gang in Zuwara to up to 22 years in prison for human trafficking, kidnapping for ransom and torture. In a separate action, the Public Prosecutor’s Office ordered the arrest of another gang accused of sending migrants from Tobruk on a dilapidated vessel that sank, resulting in the deaths of 38 Sudanese, Egyptian and Ethiopian nationals.
By: Andrews Kwesi Yeboah