JEDDAH: A three-year-old girl rescued from a crowded refugee boat that drifted for a week in the eastern Mediterranean died of a cardiac arrest on Thursday in a hospital in Cyprus.
The child was one of three girls aged 3 to 5 among 60 Syrian migrants packed on to the boat when it left Lebanon on Jan. 18. The other two girls were in a “very serious condition” and being monitored closely by doctors, Cypriot health spokesman Charalambos Charilaou said. There were 15 children on the boat, five of them unaccompanied by adults.
A search and rescue team from Cyprus found the flimsy wooden vessel drifting at sea on Wednesday 30 nautical miles off the island’s coast. It had no navigation tools, insufficient fuel, and no food.
The captain, a 47-year-old Syrian man, is under investigation for manslaughter, people trafficking and navigating an unsafe and overcrowded vessel. Famagusta district court remanded him in custody on Thursday for eight days.
Cypriot government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis said the tragedy “highlights ... in the most dramatic way that migration remains a serious problem that requires a cohesive European approach and policy.”
The total number of irregular arrivals in Cyprus last year was nearly 10,500, while more than 11,000 left voluntarily or were forcibly deported.
Cyprus says it has the highest number of first-time asylum applicants in the EU per capita, although the overall percentage of asylum seekers fell from 6 percent of the population in 2022 to 5.3 percent in 2023.
Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides urged the Lebanese government to do more to stop the flow of migrants “because we know that it is Syrians arriving, but they come from Lebanon.”
