At least 77 migrants dead after boat from Lebanon sinks off Syria

 

At least 77 migrants drowned when a boat they boarded in Lebanon sank off Syria’s coast, Syria’s health minister said Friday, in one of the deadliest such shipwrecks in the eastern Mediterranean. 

“Seventy-seven people have died,” Syria’s Health Minister Hassan al-Ghabash told state television from Al-Basel hospital in Tartus, where he said 20 survivors were being treated, including eight in critical condition. 

Tartus is the southernmost of Syria’s main ports, and lies some 50 kilometers north of the northern Lebanese port city of Tripoli, where the migrants had boarded. 

In April, the sinking of an overcrowded migrant boat pursued by the Lebanese navy off the northern coast of Tripoli killed dozens of people, sparking anger in the country. They had reportedly boarded from Tripoli in Lebanon in an attempt to reach Italy.