Cyprus jails Syrian man over the death of a 3-year-old girl on overloaded migrant boat

NICOSIA, Cyprus — A Cyprus court sentenced a Syrian national to three years in prison after finding him guilty of causing the death by negligence of a 3-year-old girl from dehydration aboard an overloaded migrant boat that was adrift for six days without adequate supplies of food and water.

The Attorney-General's Office said Friday the Famagusta criminal court ruled that the 48-year-old captain had failed to ensure the safety of the 60 Syrian migrants aboard the small wooden craft that carried no navigational aids or appropriate communications equipment.

According to the facts of the case, the captain had told the passengers at some point in the journey to throw any remaining bottles of water overboard in a bid to remove any indications that the boat had departed from Lebanon.

The boat set sail on Jan. 18, 2024, but an engine failure left the vessel adrift for nearly a week in the eastern Mediterranean, where many of the desperate passengers began to drink sea water and their own urine to quench their thirst.

Cypriot authorities had airlifted the little girl, who was accompanied by her mother, to a hospital after locating the boat but medical staff couldn't save her.

The number of people arriving in Cyprus as migrants has fallen precipitously over the past three years after the government in the European Union member took a string of get-tough measures. Authorities said the country's ability to host and accommodate many thousands of new asylum seekers was being overwhelmed.

According to the most recent government data, migrant arrivals to ethnically divided Cyprus — mostly through the breakaway Turkish Cypriot north where government authorities can't exercise jurisdiction — dropped from 17,278 in 2022 to 6,102 in 2024.

Equally, asylum applications plummeted from a record 21,565 to 6,769 over the same time period while repatriations increased to nearly 11,000 from 7,700.

In light of the fall of Bashar Assad in Syria late last year, Cyprus' Deputy Minister for Migration Nicholas Ioannides said some 40 Syrian nationals on average are requesting to either withdraw their asylum application or to revoke their international protection status. Ioannides said some 755 Syrians have already returned to their homeland.

But Cyprus has been taken to task for violating migrants' human rights at sea. Last October, Europe's top human rights court ruled that Cyprus breached the right of two Syrian nationals to seek asylum after keeping them, and more than two dozen other people, aboard a boat at sea for two days before sending them back to Lebanon.