At least 43 migrants from West Africa drowned off the coast of Libya as they were trying to reach Europe on Tuesday after their boat capsized in high waves of the Mediterranean Sea.
"It is the first incident of that sort this year," two United Nations agencies said Wednesday.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said in a joint statement that the Coast Guard in the Libyan city of Zuwara had pulled out ten survivors and took them to the beach.
However, on the seventeenth of December, IOM announced that the Libyan Coast Guard in the Mediterranean had arrested more than 120 migrants heading to Europe, including 8 women and 28 children.
Sources familiar with the organization said that a ship carrying migrants was stopped on Dec. 7 when it was en route to the European coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
The organization added that the migrants were returned to Libya, and it stated that 126 migrants were transferred from the ship to detention centers inside Libya.
The organization revealed on November 13 that 20 migrants were believed to have drowned off the coast of Libya in a boat crash, while the waves continued to wash bodies from an earlier accident ashore.
A spokeswoman for IOM said that the second drowning accident, which occurred when a boat left the coastal town of Sorman, west of the capital, Tripoli, raises the total number of those drowned from the two accidents to at least 94.
In the previous incident, a rubber boat set off from the town of Khums and capsized on Dec.12.
Last year, more than 900 people died this year while trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe. Thousands of others have been stopped at sea and sent back to Libya, where they are often vulnerable to exploitation and abuse by gangs of organized crime.
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