Over 700 refugees feared drowned off Italy Refugees sit on a boat during a rescue operation by Italian Navy vessels last March — Reuters

The UN refugee agency said more than 700 refugees may have drowned in three Mediterranean Sea shipwrecks south of Italy in the last few days. Speaking to Al Jazeera from Geneva, William Spindler, a UNHCR spokesman for Europe, said there had been a spate of incidents in the Mediterranean last week. “The first one was Wednesday, which was widely reported. A boat capsised, carrying about 600 people. Some of those people are still missing,” Spindler said.

“Then there was a second incident on Thursday and a third one on Friday. In total, we fear that in these three incidents more than 700 people are missing, presumed drowned. “There’s a number of boats at the moment trying to make their way from Libya to Italy and several rescue operations are ongoing.”

Spindler said more needed to be done to stop refugees from taking to the sea in small boats. “It’s very difficult to prevent people from doing this. In our view, what needs to be done is to offer legal alternatives to the most vulnerable refugees to travel to Europe. The reason why people are undertaking these dangerous journeys is because they’ve no choice,” he said.

Carlotta Sami, a spokeswoman for UNHCR, told the Associated Press news agency by phone an estimated 100 people were missing from a smugglers’ boat that capsised on Wednesday.

She said about 550 others were missing from the boat that sank on Thursday. Refugees said that boat, which was carrying about 670 people, did not have an engine and was being towed by another smuggling boat before it capsized.

About 25 people survived the incident, 79 others were rescued by patrol boats, and 15 bodies were recovered. Sami said 45 more bodies were recovered from the shipwreck on Friday and many more were reported missing. In a separate development, 19 refugees were rescued from a boat in the English Channel, the AFP news agency reported, citing coastguard officials.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis has held an emotional meeting with hundreds of children at the Vatican, including a Nigerian boy whose parents had drowned, and said that refugees “aren’t dangerous, but in danger”.

The meeting on Saturday followed a surge in refugee traffic this week between Libya and Italy, with more than 14,000 saved from overcrowded boats since Monday and three consecutive days of shipwrecks in which hundreds may have died.

Three infants were among 45 bodies recovered at sea on Friday, UNICEF Italy said. Meeting the mostly Italian children, who took a special train from southern Italy to the Vatican’s own railway station, Francis hugged the Nigerian boy, Osayande, who has been taken in by an Italian family.

He showed the gathering an orange life jacket he was given by a Spanish rescuer working to save lives in the Mediterranean. “He brought me this life jacket and, crying a little bit, he said: ‘Father, I failed. There was a little girl in the sea and I wasn’t able to save her. All I could reach was her life jacket’,” the pope said.

“What was her name? I don’t know — a little girl without a name . . . She’s in heaven and watching us. Let’s close our eyes, think about her and give her a name,” the pope added.

The Italian coastguard and navy ships, aided by Irish and German vessels as well as humanitarian organisations, saved 668 migrants and refugees from smugglers’ boats in distress in the Mediterranean Sea off Libya on Saturday, officials from Italy and Ireland said.

The rescues were the latest by the multi-national patrol south of Sicily that has saved thousands this week. The Irish military said the vessel Le Roisin, deployed earlier this month in the humanitarian search and rescue mission, saved 123 migrants and refugees from a 12-metre-long rubber dinghy and recovered a male body.

A German ship, part of the EUNAVFORMED deployment on patrol for smugglers’ boats, also was involved in what was a total of four separate rescue operations, the Italian coastguard said in a statement early on Saturday evening.

Meanwhile, with migrant and refugee shelters filling up in Sicily, the Italian navy vessel Vega headed towards Reggio Calabria, a southern Italian mainland port, bringing 135 survivors, along with 45 bodies, from a rescue a day earlier. The Vega was due to dock yesterday.

Under a European Union deal, tens of thousands of those rescued at sea and seeking asylum were supposed to be relocated to other EU nations from Italy and Greece, whose shores have received most of the migrants and refugees in recent years.

But with resentment building in some European countries about taking in refugees, the plan never really took off, and only a small percentage of those slated for relocation have actually been moved. The pope has repeatedly sought to underscore the plight of these people, especially the hundreds of thousands who have risked their lives to come to Europe in flimsy boats.

He visited the Greek island of Lesbos last month, bringing 12 refugees back on his plane to set an example of how other people and countries should welcome refugees. “The number of minors who make the journey on their own and arrive in Europe is much higher than what we saw last year,” Save the Children spokeswoman Giovanna Di Benedetto said.

“But we’re increasingly coming across much younger children, children of nine or ten years of age, who have made the journey alone or who have lost their parents or family members with whom they were travelling,” she said. — Al Jazeera

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