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NICOSIA – Nineteen people drowned when a boat loaded with 150 people suspected of being capsized off the northern coast of Cyprus, said Wednesday a Cypriot official Turkish.
Tolga Atakan, the minister in the separatist enclave of Cyprus told the Associated Press that rescue teams were looking for 25 missing pbadengers in an area where a cargo ship had reported spotting people in the area. Water
. the pbadengers of the capsized boat and took them to Turkey. A serious wounded man was being treated at a hospital in the northern part of the Cypriot capital, Nicosia, he added.
Atakan indicated that the nationality of the pbadengers had not been confirmed. When asked if they were migrants, Atakan said: "most likely."
Aysegul Baybars, the interior minister of northern Cyprus, said on television Turkish CNN-Turk that authorities were investigating bad weather, sabotage
She said the authorities did not know where the boat was going from or where it was heading.
The capsizing occurred about 26 km north of the Karpas Peninsula, but it is still not clear When
In May, nine Syrian migrants drowned when their boat was capsized off the northern coast of Cyprus. The UN refugee agency said it was the first shipwreck involving migrants off the island nation.
Constantinos Petrides, Minister of the Interior of the Internationally Recognized Government of Cyprus, told the Associated Press that the new arrivals
The 2,500 asylum applications received by Cyprus during the first half of the year place the country alongside Greece which has the highest number of asylum seekers per capita in the European Union. Thousands of migrants in Europe have tried to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa this year, a dangerous journey often made in overcrowded and inadequate boats purchased by human smugglers.
The International Organization for Migration declared in front of the Cypriot wreck that 1,443 people died or disappeared this year in the M The conflict between the Italian government and the private aid groups that Patrol the sea to find people in danger has intensified Wednesday when a Spanish aid organization has avoided an Italian port in Spain. Proactiva Open Arms said it found a survivor and two dead bodies of a shipwrecked ship on Tuesday, and accused Italy of complicity.
The ship Open Arms was to arrive Saturday in the port of Palma de Mallorca The government spokesman who was not allowed to be quoted in the media
The humanitarian organization accused Monday the Libyan coastguards, formed by Italy and funded by the European Union, to abandon Monday the other three
But the aid group also aimed to criticize the Italian authorities , who first allowed the Open Arms to dock in the Sicilian port of Catania, according to the newspaper Proactiva
. the aid group said that he did not trust the way the Italian government would deal with the wreckage investigation Monday after the minister of l & # 39; Interior, Matteo Salvini, called the group's account "lies and insults" "The strong man of the new Italian populist government, Salvini, has promised to stop the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean, to badist the Libyan authorities and close the country's ports to aid groups that it accuses of helping human traffickers picking up migrants and bringing them to Europe
Proactiva reported that a woman and a young boy had died by the time private rescuers found them Tuesday morning in the waters about 80 miles off the Libyan coast.The rescuers also found a woman hung on a piece of wood among the remains of an inflatable boat 10 meters long. [19659002] The Libyan Coast Guard denied on Tuesday that it had left someone at sea and blamed human smugglers for the deaths at sea. In addition to blaming elements of the Libyan Coast Guard, Proactiva's director, Oscar Camps, said that Italy was responsible for "enlisting killers" to "kill and" torturing "those who are trying to" Matteo Salvini's policy is responsible for this crime, "said Camps in a statement
Salvini responded to the criticism in a tweet that rhetorically asked why the Open Arms vessel was leaking the safe Italian.
"Do humanitarian groups say that the pressure on them from hostile governments is increasing the number of deaths at sea, and that there has been a sharp drop in arrivals of refugees and migrants into the European Union since 2015?
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