Twenty-five young Egyptian illegal migrants drowned in the Mediterranean Sea on Thursday en route to Europe, security sources in Sharqiya said on Thursday.
The majority of the deceased resided in Belbais, Sharqiya governorate, the sources said.
The families of the victims called on Persident Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and the interior minister to recover the bodies from the sea.
The tragedy follows a bigger incident last week, in which some 500 illegal emigrants drowned in the Mediterranean while attempting to cross to Europe.The dead were from Egypt, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan.
According to UN officials, the mass drowning occured when human traffickers attempted to cram more people onto an already crowded boat. Survivors said they started their journey in Libya and were heading for Italy.
News of the disaster emerged on the first anniversary of one of the worst disasters in the Mediterranean, when an estimated 800 migrants drowned off the Libyan coast after the fishing boat they were sailing in collided with a mercantile vessel that had been attempting to rescue them.
Some 150,000 migrants reached Italy by boat in 2015, the vast majority sailing from Libya. So far this year, about 25,000 migrants have arrived, an increase of 4.7 percent over the same period last year, according to Interior Ministry data.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
