TRIPOLI – An overcrowded boat which departed several days ago from the Libyan coast was shipwrecked in international waters leaving 90 dead and only four survivors, said NGO Doctors Without Borders.

 Those left alive were rescued on Saturday by a commercial ship and taken back to Libya where they are likely to face “detention, abuse and mistreatment.”

 The commercial ship, an oil tanker called Alegria 1, ignored the appeal from Doctors Without Borders requesting that the survivors not be sent back to Libya "where their lives will be put in danger again." Alegria 1 also turned down the NGO's offer of medical assistance for the four survivors of the boat, which had departed with almost 100 people on board and been stranded at sea for at least four days.

 Doctors Without Borders also appealed to the coordination centers in Rome and Malta to “take over the operation and assign a safe place for the survivors before it is too late.”

 NGO Sea Watch said the shipwreck was of “catastrophic dimensions” and that they felt “huge pain” and “enormous anger.”

 In 2021 1,581 people died at sea along the Central Mediterranean route, and already in the first months of this year there have been hundreds of people reported dead and missing. In the first two weeks of March there were 70 deaths, according to world migrant organisation IOM Italy.

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