The team of SNHR documented the drowning of 101 people on Friday, October, 11, 2013, among them 54 children and 22 women. The ship they were boarding has drowned while transporting Syrian refugees from Libya to Italy. About 200 people escaped, while tens of people are still lost.
In addition to that, about 13 people were killed, among them one child, in different drowning accidents during their attempts to migrate to Europe between November, 2013 and January, 2014.
The number of Syrian refugees has been increasing cumulatively over the past three years, especially in the year 2013. Syrians have been fleeing their country because of the bombing that destroyed about 850 thousand buildings and because of sexual violence, arrests and sieges. SNHR has estimated that the number of refugees is more than 3.6 million.
Thousands of Syrian immigrants have crossed seas and reached Europeans countries in illegal ways in order to get asylum and live in those countries. Those journeys are usually very dangerous; lots of Syrians are cheated by smuggling networks and some of them have miraculously escaped drowning because smugglers carry them with fishing boats or very old ships that lack the minimum safety measures. In addition to that, these ships carry doubling numbers of passengers which is the reason behind the drowning cases.
The team of SNHR is reporting here one drowning accident of Syrian immigrants.
SNHR is mentioning here that it doesn’t have an accurate statistic of the numbers of Syrian immigrants or of those who drowned or lost during their attempts to travel by sea and seek asylum, since SNHR has no working members in those areas, in addition to the fact that most of the bodies of the victims disappear in the sea where rescue teams fail to find them. In this report we depend mainly on the eyewitnesses of those who escaped, in addition to the pictures, videos and reports that were sent to the email of SNHR, after being checked and investigated.