Thousands of people fleeing persecution are choosing the most dangerous and lethal route into Europe – the Mediterranean Sea. Sunday’s catastrophic tragedy, in which nearly 800 people drowned during a botched rescue operation, exposes Europe’s continued failure to save migrants fleeing conflict, persecution and violence.

Amnesty International’s report, Europe’s Sinking Shame, highlights the magnitude of this humanitarian crisis and includes harrowing accounts of survivors from three of this year’s boat crossing disasters.

Ivan Martin takes a look through the experiences of these migrants and the gap in search and rescue operations resulting from the end of Mare Nostrum and the limitations of Triton.

Abubaker Kallow, 21, from Gambia

In January, Mr Kallow was put on a boat by “an Arab man” and told to steer the vessel in the same direction for eight hours. He was shown how to fill the tank with fuel, and then the smuggler jumped in the water and left.

He hoped the journey would go smoothly but after more than a day out at sea, lost and confused, the gravity of the situation started getting to those on board.

“We were at sea all night, but we did not reach Italy. People started losing their mind. Some said they wanted to go and get food or go back to their country, then jumped into the water. I do not know how many jumped. I lost concentration, some drank sea water. Many died,” he said.

Mr Kallow helped throw the bodies of those who died of exhaustion and food deprivation overboard. He does not remember how many bodies he saw sink into the harsh January sea.

“When we arrived in Malta they allowed us to call our families. I called my mum. She cried when I told her,” he said.

Up to 34 people died at sea from the 122 travelling on Mr Kallow’s boat. The Armed Forces of Malta rescured the survivors on January 22.

Eighty-eight young men from sub-Saharan Africa were saved, but one died in hospital shortly after.

Survivors who were held in the Safi detention centre later told Amnesty International they had left Garabouli, Libya, on January 15 at about 6pm.

They had no telephones, water or food, and no life jackets. They were packed so tightly in their small inflatable dinghy that they could not sit or lie down. They soon became exhausted, cold and extremely thirsty.

After a few days, fuel ran out and the dinghy started taking in water. They had no buckets to bail it and some felt their feet freezing after immersion for days in cold water.

Their boat had been drifting for around eight days before a fishing boat spotted them around two nautical miles east of Maltese shores.

Lam, 24, from Mali

A total of 107 migrants were crammed on Lam’s boat after the smugglers counted them and ordered them to climb aboard.

It was not long, however, before people started falling into the sea due to exhaustion and strong winds.

“Those who fell in the sea tried to grab on to the boat again but did not manage. I saw three falling in the water. Others died for other reasons, maybe lack of food and water. We were only seven left when rescue arrived,” he said, lamenting the death of fellow travellers.

On February 8, four shipwrecks led to the death of more than 330 victims. Italian coastguard officials told Amnesty International they received a satellite phone call for help. It was mostly unintelligible but the officials could make out the words “dangerous, dangerous” in English. An aircraft and two patrol boats were sent out, followed by two more after one of the initial boats reported an engine problem.

Despite prohibitive weather conditions, with exceptionally strong winds and several-metre-high waves, the rescuers managed to reach the boat in distress after nearly seven hours of navigation and rescued 105 people from one dinghy at 9pm.

Italian rescue officer Salvatore Caputo

Rescue officer Salvatore Caputo was on duty when the call for help from Lam’s boat came in on February 8. He recalled how he had looked on helplessly as the migrants he had just helped pluck from violent seas shivered to death on the exposed deck of his Italian patrol boat.

“They were exhausted, thirsty, very hungry… As we proceeded to transfer the men onto our vessels, with a merchant vessel trying to shelter us, the sea became even rougher and we could not see much,” he said.

“We gave them foil blankets and heat packs, but they were not much use. It was very cold, perhaps zero degrees. They had been standing with their feet in the water on their dinghy for some days and were very weak,” he told Amnesty International in a detailed account of the rescue operation.

Most of the migrants were drenched and took off their clothes to try and keep warm, but the gruelling 18-hour journey to Italy proved too long for many: 29 of the 105 people Mr Caputo helped pull from the clutches of certain death died on the way to the mainland.

Seeing this, Mr Caputo desperately tried to find a solution, rotating migrants in and out of the boat’s small cabin to try to keep them from developing hypothermia.

“The high waves, hail and limited space made this almost impossible. I felt so enraged, saving them and then just watching them die,” he said.

Assembling the puzzle from survivors’ accounts of the February 8 wrecks

Amnesty International said some 420 refugees and migrants had left together from the Libyan port town of Garabouli, 40km west of Tripoli, in four inflatable dinghies.

Most were young men from West Africa and several were minors. People smugglers had kept them near Tripoli to await the journey after charging them around €650.

The boats were powered by small outboard motors, and the smugglers had not provided enough water or fuel for the trip.

Italian coastguard officials, who were later interviewed, stressed that the weather forecast in that part of the Mediterranean was bad for the entire week, something the smugglers would have been well aware of.

High waves washed several people overboard. Then the first dinghy deflated and started taking in water until it was found by the Italian coast guard. The second was never found and left no survivors.

Merchant vessels assisted the two other dinghies. One of these had only seven people alive on board. It went down along with many who had died as the few survivors were climbing the rope thrown to them by the crew of the merchant vessel.

The fourth dinghy was found by another merchant vessel in the afternoon the following day, deflated and with only the front side afloat, to which two men had managed to hold on.

Survivors believe that more than 330 of their fellow travellers perished that night. Smugglers are believed to have shuffled about 105 people on board each of the four dinghies.

Mohammed, 25, a Palestinian from Lebanon

Mohammed’s boat capsized on March 5 after all the people onboard ran to one side to call for help at the sight of an oncoming tugboat.

His crowded vessel was carrying around 150 people, including 20 women and 10 young children.

“When the boat overturned I fell into the water, I was the first one in and I couldn’t breathe,” he said.

In the water, Muhammed saw Immirdan, a Syrian woman, struggling to keep her child above water.

After a few minutes of desperate paddling, Immirdan died with her one-year-old son face down. They couldn’t swim.

“She had asked me for some bread, chocolate and cheese earlier and I gave it to her. Twenty minutes later, the boat capsized and she was dead in front of me,” he said.

The Italian coastguard vessel Dattilo was nearby, with 381 people rescued in a previous operation already on board. It managed to save 121 people. It also retrieved 10 bodies.

The Italian and Maltese coastguards both told Amnesty that preventing the boat from capsizing was a primary concern. The officials said people in a sinking vessel tended to move to one side when help was approaching. To avoid such a risk, professional rescuers said they normally approached the boats with a smaller vessel. The tugboat crew involved in this case, however, could not do so.

Amnesty’s recommendations

• European governments should urgently launch a multi-country humanitarian operation aimed at saving lives in the Mediterranean.

• Until such a mission is in place, European governments should provide Italy and Malta with the necessary resources to fill in the gaps left by Mare Nostrum.

• The European Commission should support such a mission, and the European Agenda on Migration, to be launched next month, should also make a call for this.

• To reduce the number of crossings, EU governments should increase the number of resettlement places, humanitarian admissions and visas for people in need of international protection.

‘Triton is no replacement for Mare Nostrum’

The gap in search and rescue resources left by the defunct Italian operation Mare Nostrum and not filled by Triton is the root cause of increased migrant deaths, according to Amnesty International.

In its detailed report, Amnesty insisted that unless search and rescue operations were amplified, the situation would continue to deteriorate.

More than 2,000 migrants have lost their lives so far this year, compared to just 17 for the same period in 2014.

The old Mare Nostrum mission employed double the amphibious vessels currently used by the EU’s Triton mission and double the frigates. Mare Nostrum had a monthly budget of nearly €10 million, compared to Triton’s nearly €3m.

Amnesty said although its contribution was not negligible, the Triton mission remained “insufficient” to face the current and foreseeable demand for search and rescue, and the gap left was clearly linked to the diminished search and rescue operations.

The report quotes the head of the Italian coastguard, Giovanni Pettrino, claiming that once migrant departures pick up in the fast approaching summer months, more lives will certainly be lost unless something is done.

Meanwhile, Commander Massimiliano Lauretti, who previously worked on the Italian Mare Nostrum mission, said the Italian Navy was “ready” to reintroduce the Italian mission if the order was made.

This, he said, would take no longer than 72 hours to accomplish, and the personnel were fully rehearsed for such an occasion.

The end of Mare Nostrum has also resulted in increased pressure on commercial ships to rescue migrants in distress, Amnesty said.

This year, 111 merchant ships have already been diverted to search and rescue calls in the central Mediterranean Sea; 41 of these have rescued around 4,000 people.

Last month the main shipping industry associations and seafarers unions expressed concerns at “the migration problem developing north of Libya”.

Shortly after the industry heavyweights spoke out about the situation, the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees said the rescues were resulting in heavy financial losses for shipping companies. The companies were in turn re-routing to avoid areas of heavy migrant boat traffic.

Amnesty International said such ships were far from equipped to help in such rescues anyway.