Europol to investigate Egypt mass drowning

PanARMENIAN.Net - The European policing agency Europol is planning to investigate what is believed to be the biggest loss of a migrant boat in 2016, following a Reuters-BBC Newsnight investigation, BBC News said.

More than 500 people are thought to have died in the sinking on 9 April, but there has been no official inquiry.

Newsnight has established that the boat set sail from Egypt - not Libya, as the UNHCR stated at the time.

The head of Europol, Rob Wainwright, said the case was "uncomfortable".

He welcomed the Reuters-BBC Newsnight investigation and promised "to look at it again" given "the absence of any clear answers".

The UN estimates that 4,663 people have died this year attempting to cross the Mediterranean, making it the most deadly year on record. But the shipwrecks are frequently not investigated.

Reuters and BBC Newsnight spent months piecing together the story of what happened to the ship that sank on 9 April 2016 - speaking to survivors, to relatives of the victims, and eventually tracking down the smugglers, the brokers, and the details of the ship that sank.

Thirty-seven people survived the shipwreck, but more than 500 are believed to have died. Those who perished came from Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Syria, Egypt and a number of other countries.

Each had paid around $2,000 to smugglers in the hope of reaching Italy.