Italy yesterday urged Nato to help rescue refugees fleeing Libya by sea and called for an inquiry into reports the alliance failed to aid a stricken boat on which dozens were said to have died of dehydration.

Nato’s mandate in Libya should be changed “to take into consideration the care and rescue of those who are forced to flee by boat, putting their lives at risk because of combat operations,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

Italy said it had requested “an internal discussion” on the issue within Nato.

Foreign Minister Franco Frattini later said in a television interview that there was “an obligation to protect desperate civilians put on boats by Gaddafi on boats and sent to die in the Mediterranean.”

Hundreds of refugees – mainly migrant workers from other parts of Africa who were stranded in Libya when the conflict broke out – have drowned or died on board rickety boats in desperate crossings from Libya in recent months.

Twenty-five refugees are believed to have choked to death in the engine room of a boat intercepted by Italian coast guards on Monday and taken to the island of Lampedusa – a rocky outcrop in the middle of the Mediterranean.

Some of the 370 survivors from another boat that arrived in Lampedusa on Thursday after leaving Libya yesterday week, said dozens who had died of hunger and thirst were thrown overboard, according to Italian media reports.

Italian official sources cited by Ansa said Italy had on Thursday asked for help from a Nato vessel participating in the naval embargo on Libya after being alerted to the stricken refugees by a Cypriot tug that had spotted them.

The Nato vessel had been 27 nautical miles away, Ansa reported.

The refugees “were left for six days and six nights on the high seas without food or water, forced to look on” as “dozens” died around them,” said Mario Testa, a doctor who spent the night treating some of the survivors.