NICOSIA: A three-year-old girl among 60 Syrian migrants rescued from a crowded wooden boat off the coast of Cyprus died on Thursday, officials on the island said.

The child was one of three girls, aged three to five, who emergency services found unconscious on Wednesday after they had been adrift in the Mediterranean for a week.

State health services spokesman Charalambos Charilaou told the state broadcaster the girl had died of a cardiac arrest in hospital in Nicosia. The other two girls were in a “very serious condition” and being monitored closely by doctors, he said.

There were 15 children on the boat, including five unaccompanied minors, said the official.

Cypriot government spo­kesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis expressed shock at the death and said the “incident highlights... in the most dramatic way that migration remains a serious problem that requires a cohesive European approach and policy”.

The island, an EU member state, has experienced a sharp rise in migrant arrivals. Numbers quadrupled in 2023, according to the government, with almost all of them from war-torn Syria.

The migrants had left Lebanon — which neighbours Syria and is about 160 kilometres from Cyprus — on Jan 18. Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides on Wednesday said the Leba­nese government should do more to stop the flow “because we know that it is Syrians arriving, but they come from Lebanon”.

According to the Phileleftheros newspaper, police found the migrant boat had no navigation tools, insufficient fuel and no food. The migrants said the boat suffered engine failure mid-journey and started drifting, the paper reported. A 47-year-old Syrian man, the suspected captain of the vessel, was detained in custody for eight days on Thursday.

Published in Dawn, January 26th, 2024