Terror on the Mediterranean: One life jacket for a family of three

It's "high season" on the rugged coast of Libya. Not for tourists or pleasure boating, but for the hundreds of migrants who every day crowd aboard rickety ships to cross the Mediterranian Sea.

Yesterday, one of those vessels, a boat designed to hold 30 or 40 fishermen flipped over. It held an estimated 600 migrants. At least 400 were rescued. 

Doctors without Borders staffer Juan Matias was aboard the "Dignity1," the second boat to  arrive at the accident scene. Matias and his crewmates threw life jackets to the migrants. Among those reaching for help was a Palestinian couple, desperate to rescue their 19-month-old daughter.

"This baby was going down in the water," Matias says. The mother didn't know how to swim, so her husband gave her the one life jacket and dove under water for his child. All three were eventually rescued and taken by helicopter to the Italian shore.

"Definitely they are the lucky ones," Matias says. "We estimate that half of the people, more or less, are still underwater over there. The boat that capsized is having two levels, two floors, so probably many people got trapped in the boat. They will never go out."

When a rescue vessel initially approached the fishing boat, most of the migrants rushed to one side of the ship, causing the boat to capsize. "Everybody wanted to be rescued first," he says. "This is the most risky situation."

Matias says rescue boats use megaphones to warn migrants to remain calm and avoid tipping their boats.

"You can shout, you can message, but then you cannot control the actions, the behavior of the people," he laments.

More than 2,000 migrants are said to have died in 2015 trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe.

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