Smugglers threw asylum seekers into Mediterranean
One of the few survivors of the ship that was deliberately sunk off Malta by smugglers, drowning up to 500 people, recounts her story.
ALEXANDRIA, Egypt — The journey started like any other.
The migrants paid the smugglers. Buses collected them in groups of around 100 and took them to Damietta, a port on the northeastern edge of the Nile Delta. On Sept. 6, the several hundred migrants from Egypt, the Gaza Strip, Sudan and Syria left Damietta, bound for Italy.
But it wasn’t to be. On Sept. 14, news spread of an almost unprecedented human tragedy in the Mediterranean. The Damietta boat had been deliberately sunk four days earlier by smugglers off the coast of Malta. At the time, around 500 people were believed drowned or missing. Just a handful of survivors remained.
"Najwa," a refugee who asked to use a pseudonym, was on that boat. She told Al-Monitor, "I paid 20,000 Egyptian pounds [$2,800] to the smugglers, but each nationality was paying a different price." Najwa added that the smugglers running the trip were of different nationalities: Egyptian, Libyan and Palestinian.
