According to information released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) on Thursday, at least seven Pakistanis have perished in a boat accident close to the port city of Benghazi, Libya.
Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Office, claimed that the Pakistani embassy in Libya was assisting with the identification of the dead during a weekly press briefing.
With the assistance of regional authorities and the International Committee of the Red Cross, she stated that the bodies would be transferred back to Pakistan.
Baloch stated that the deceased people’s families were also being communicated with by the Pakistani embassy and the ministry of foreign affairs.
A similar tragedy occurred last month when a wooden sailing boat carrying migrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and other nations came aground on rocks off the coast of southern Italy.
The ship, which had departed Turkiye a few days prior, capsized in rough seas close to the beach town of Steccato di Cutro on the eastern coast of Calabria. Bodies, shoes, and other wreckage washed ashore along a considerable distance from the shore.
An early-Sunday collision between a wooden sailing boat carrying migrants and rocks off the southern Italian coast resulted in more than 60 deaths, some of them children. Subsequently, the Italian authorities announced that they had detained two Pakistanis and a Turk on accusations of smuggling 200 or more people aboard the wooden boat.
Two Pakistani citizens and a Turkish man, who were named by witnesses as “the main culprits of the tragedy,” carried the boat from Turkey to Italy despite the poor weather, according to Lieutenant Colonel Alberto Lippolis.
According to preliminary investigations, they allegedly demanded that each migrant pay roughly 8,000 euros ($8,485) for the perilous trek, according to Lippolis, the head of a finance police squad in the Calabrian province. The police have detained all three.
