Hundreds of men, women and children fought desperately for their lives in the cold, dark Mediterranean water last Thursday night when their boat capsized somewhere off Malta.
After their clandestine vessel tipped, their struggle to stay afloat lasted for several minutes, but with no rescue vessel in sight, some 156 are believed to have drowned.
A few survivors were taken to Southern Italy, traumatised after having watched family and friends drown.
The tragic tale is just one of a series of accounts of death and survival published by the International Organisation for Migration earlier this week in a report on migration route through the central Mediterranean.
The organisation said 60,521 migrants had entered Europe by sea so far this year, with over 80 per cent arriving in Italy.
This is less than a third of the 193,333 arrivals recorded for the same period in 2016.
The IOM said that while the number of arrivals had dropped significantly, the threat to human life the Mediterranean crossing posed was still very real.
IOM spokesperson Flavio Di Giacomo said that just last Friday, rescue teams picked up around 2,000 migrants in distress, indicating that the total number of survivors rescued between Tuesday and Thursday would be close to 6,000, all believed to have sailed from Libya.
Mr Di Giacomo said some 4,129 migrants rescued last week were expected to land in Italian ports shortly.
Recounting an incident from two weeks ago, Mr Di Giacomo said a dinghy carrying some 130 migrants that had departed from Sabratha, Libya, passed another dinghy in distress and took on four people at sea, all Nigerians, who had been struggling to stay afloat.
The four survivors reported that they had departed from Tripoli a few hours earlier.
According to their testimony, at least 100 fellow passengers were on that craft and died at sea, including dozens of women and children.
Meanwhile, one “remarkable development”, the IOM said, was the increasing presence of Bangladeshi and Moroccan migrants, who combined made up over 7,000 of some 30,000 arrivals to Italy from North Africa so far this year. There had been almost no arrivals from these countries three years ago, the organisation said.
“This year, by the end of February, Bangladeshis were the fourth highest nationality at landing points in Italy. By the end of April, they were the second nationality,” said Federico Soda, director of IOM’s Coordination Office for the Mediterranean in Rome.
IOM field staff in Sicily spoke with two groups of Bangladeshi migrants who said they had to rely on “agents” in Bangladesh to organise entire journeys from Dhaka to Libya.
One group reportedly said they had left Bangladesh through an “agency” that promised them work visas for some €5,000. They added that they had been living in Libya for about a year before trying to get to Europe.