UPDATE 3: Search to resume for 70 missing migrants, 3 bodies found yesterday

Updated 8.30 a.m. Aug 28

Two German helicopters based in Malta for Frontex patrols are this morning due to resume the search for as many as 70 would-be illegal immigrants reported missing off Malta.

One of the helicopters late yesterday afternoon spotted three bodies floating in the water 56 miles south of Malta, in approximately the same position where, yesterday morning, the Maltese fishing boat Madonna di Pompei rescued eight migrants from a half-submerged dinghy. It was those survivors who told the police and the local UNHCR representative that they had been in a group of 78.

Neil Falzon, the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) representative, said the surviving migrants he had spoken to, at Safi detention Centre, came from Ghana and Togo.

They told him that the group of 78 migrants including four women, three of them pregnant, left from the Libyan coast on a dinghy on Thursday. Their dinghy started taking in water early on Monday and it then capsized.

Mr Falzon said he was appealing to the government to release these survivors for medical and psychological attention. He said two of them, in particular, were in very weak condition and all were severely traumatized.

The eighth survivor, who says he is 15 hears old, is being cared for at Hal Far.

Mr Falzon said tthose in the boat came form various countries including Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

"This is a major tragedy on the scale we see elsewhere" Mr Falzon said.

There had initially been some confusion on the number of missing migrants, with the fishermen having told the AFM that the migrants said they were in a group of 18.

The AFM launched an air search using an Islander fixed wing aircraft as soon as it was learnt that some migrants were missing.

Several such large groups of migrants in dinghies were reported in the past few weeks.