Jordan's Queen Rania urges respect for all lives at risk at sea

'Two tragic situations, two very different global responses', she wrote after a mass drowning and the Titanic submersible hunt

Queen Rania wears Taller Marmo for a special iftar. Photo: Instagram / Queen Rania

Jordan's Queen Rania has shared a message of solidarity with refugees, saying every life is "worth saving" as two high-profile but very different incidents at sea draw public attention.

Early last week an overloaded smuggling vessel off Greece capsized, leaving more than 500 migrants missing, and on Sunday a submersible carrying five passengers went missing on a trip to view the wreckage of the Titanic.

A fleet of search ships is hunting for the Titan vessel in the North Atlantic about 1,450 kilometres east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The submersible craft, built by OceanGate Expeditions and carrying its founder and CEO Stockton Rush, may have already run out of oxygen, the US coastguard has said.

Some have drawn contrasts between the way the different rescue operations have been received by the public, with coverage of the Titanic disaster outstripping that of the hundreds of migrants whose lives are thought lost in European seas.

Sharing a drawing by Northern Irish artist Oliver Jeffers showing news cameras pointed at the Titan sub while a group of refugees float near a capsized boat, she noted the different responses to the tragedies of the Greek Islands and the sub travellers.

"Two tragic situations," she wrote, "two very different global responses. Every human life is worth saving."

Queen Rania has been outspoken on how refugees are treated across the world.

Last November, she pointed out the differences in the response to refugees fleeing war in Ukraine and those from other conflicts.

"It’s hard to ignore the difference in generosity, tone, and urgency between the welcome extended to Ukrainian refugees and those fleeing devastation in countries like Syria, South Sudan, or Myanmar,” she told the International Web Summit.

Jordan hosts the second largest number of refugees per capita worldwide, with more than 723,412 individuals registered with the UNHCR. Unofficial numbers are thought to bring the total to over one million, mostly Syrians and Palestinians.

Nine Egyptian men have been arrested in Greece over the incident in which a trawler carrying refugees capsized while making the five-day trip from Libya to Italy. Only 104 men survived.

Survivors' accounts seen by AP claimed that women and children were trapped in the hold as the ship capsized and sank within minutes to one of the deepest spots in the Mediterranean.

The testimonies also echoed previous accounts that the steel-hulled trawler sank in calm seas during a botched attempt to tow it. This clashes with the Greek coast guard's insistence that neither its patrol boat, which escorted the trawler in its last hours, nor any other vessel attached a tow rope.

“The Greek ship cast a rope and it was tied to our bows,” survivor Abdul Rahman Alhaz said in his sworn testimony. “We shouted ‘stop, stop!’ because our boat was listing."

He added that the trawler "was in bad shape and overloaded, and shouldn’t have been towed.”