Red Cross delivers food to Somali refugee ship

Mombasa (Reuter) - Red Cross workers delivered emergency food supplies yesterday to Somali refugees stranded off Kenya since Wednesday on a ship which Kenyan authorities are not allowing to dock. A spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said the ship was carrying 150 children, 118 women and 83 men.

The ship's Pakistani captain, Nishan Ahmad, said the refugees had been fighting for the last scraps before food supplies ran out. He appealed to Kenyan authorities to let them land, saying two babies needed medical attention. Kenyan authorities said a refugee camp at Utange, near Mombasa, was already overcrowded, and arrangements were being made to move the 28,000 Somalis there to a new location.

French authorities in Djibouti said yesterday that a helicopter had plucked five survivors from the sea and a ship had recovered 45 bodies after a Somali-registered vessel went down in local waters.