One of the two boats carrying immigrants reported missing after leaving Libyan shores had been rescued by the Italian navy on Sunday and the second passed by Malta on its voyage towards Sicily.

The Armed Forces of Malta yesterday denied claims made in the international media that one of the boats was heading towards the island.

An unnamed Libyan official was quoted by Reuters news agency yesterday saying that one of the boats had reached Italy and the other was "spotted close to Malta".

However, a spokesman for the AFM insisted that one boat was rescued south of Lampedusa by the Italian navy on Sunday and the other was "sighted offshore Malta and continued sailing towards Sicily without any difficulty".

He said the Italian authorities were alerted by the AFM of the boat's presence.

Meanwhile, the full scale of the human tragedy that developed in the Mediterranean on Sunday continued emerging yesterday with the Libyan authorities recovering the bodies of 100 migrants who drowned when their boat capsized in stormy weather.

"Seventy-seven bodies of the migrants washed up in the beach west of Tripoli late Tuesday and 23 more bodies were found between Sunday night and Tuesday," a Libyan official told Reuters.

Bad weather and passenger panic caused the deadly sinking of a smugglers' boat off Libya, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said.

Survivors told IOM staff that the smuggler, an Egyptian national, was among those who drowned when the boat capsized three hours after it left Janzour, 15 kilometres west of Tripoli.

"The migrants said they had survived because they had stayed at the back of the boat, the only part to have remained afloat," the IOM said.

There were 257 people on board the ship, of whom 70 were women and two were children.

About 20 migrants survived the accident, including one woman. Many survivors had kidney problems having consumed sea water but otherwise they appeared in good health.

Estimates of the total number aboard the ship vary. Libyan officials believe there were 365 people attempting the journey on the boat that was supposed to hold only 75.

The migrants were Somalis, Nigerians, Eritreans, Kurds, Algerians, Moroccans, Palestinians and Tunisians, according to the officials. The ill-fated ship was one of four migrant boats that had sailed from Libya between Saturday and Sunday, apparently heading to Italy.

Libyan coastguard had rescued 350 migrants, many of them women and children, after their boat broke down Sunday near a Libyan offshore oilfield, they said.

There are between one million and 1.5 million African migrants in Libya, according to the IOM.

Libya is both a transit and a destination country for migrants. Most take odd jobs to raise enough money to pay smugglers for the risky journey to Italy.

IOM and Libyan officials said there appeared to have been a surge in the number of people using smugglers to leave North Africa, prompted by fears that Libya and Italy would step up a crackdown on illegal migration next month.

The two countries are expected to start joint military sea patrols on May 15 to try and stem the flow of illegal migrants.

ksansone@timesofmalta.com

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.