International Organization for Migration

Silla Zelia, a 23-year-old from Ivory Coast, is stuck in Italy's largest migrant center with nowhere to go after her asylum application was twice rejected and she lost contact with her family in Abidjan.

"One can get stuck here for two years, three years," she said from the former U.S. Navy housing complex in the heart of Sicily. "It's not easy."

Italian police have arrested two suspected people traffickers among the survivors of the migrant boat that capsized off Libya on April 19, as the UN said 800 people were killed in the Mediterranean's worst migrant disaster.

The International Organization for Migration received a distress call from a sinking boat carrying 300 migrants in the Mediterranean Sea.

A spokesman of the organisation said that some twently people are believed to have drowned, the BBC reports.

The caller stated that at least three boats needed help in international waters.

Italian police arrested 15 African men suspected of throwing about a dozen Christians from a migrant boat in the Mediterranean on April 16, as the crisis off southern Italy intensified. 

Forty-one more deaths were reported in a separate incident. 

Up to 400 illegal migrants died after their vessel capsized off the Libyan coast on April 12, said survivors who were brought to Italy, where tension is mounting over a surge in boat arrivals from North Africa.

A total of 1,793 migrants detained in Greece without proper travel documents were returned to their homelands in March, the Greek Police reported on Tuesday.

Another 10 Romanian citizens and a family member were evacuated on Sunday from Yemen, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed in a release to AGERPRES.

Photo credit: (c) Liviu SOVA / AGERPRES ARCHIVE

Africa's envoy to the European Union warned Wednesday that EU plans to process migrants in the countries they leave or transit on their way to Europe are "a dangerous approach."

The EU is trying to persuade Niger, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Turkey to pre-screen migrants and has launched a pilot project to send immigration officers abroad to help assess asylum demands.

An air strike killed dozens of people at a camp for displaced people in northwest Yemen on March 30, aid workers said, as Arab warplanes bombard rebels around the country.
      
The International Organization for Migration said 45 internally displaced people had been killed and 65 wounded at the Al-Mazrak camp in Hajja province.
      

The Turkish Coast Guard rescued over 2,000 irregular migrants in the East Mediterranean between August 2014 and January 2015, officials have announced.

"Some 2,114 irregular migrants have been rescued from 16 vessels/boats intercepted in the East Mediterranean between August 2014 and January 2015," the Turkish Coast Guard stated in a press release on Feb. 13.