MOSCOW (Sputnik) – A passing merchant ship picked up 41 survivors drifting at sea on Saturday, April 16.
"If confirmed, as many as 500 people may have lost their lives when a large ship went down in the Mediterranean Sea at an unknown location between Libya and Italy," UNHCR said in a statement after interviewing survivors in the southern Greek city of Kalamata.
"After sailing for several hours, the smugglers in charge of the boat attempted to transfer the passengers to a larger ship carrying hundreds of people in terribly overcrowded conditions. At one point during the transfer, the larger boat capsized and sank," UNHCR added.
The 41 survivors, three of them women and one a 3-year-old child, were either those who had not yet boarded the larger boat or those who managed to swim back to the smaller vessel.
"They drifted at sea possibly for three days before being spotted and rescued," the agency stressed.
The International Organization for Migration estimated on Saturday that over 177,000 migrants have arrived in Europe by sea since the start of the year. EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said this week that Operation Sophia, a European Union anti-smuggling mission in the Mediterranean, saved 13,000 lives, neutralized 104 vessels and arrested 68 suspected smugglers in the past 6 months.
Europe has faced an enormous influx of migrants fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa. The EU border agency Frontex recorded over 1.83 million illegal border crossings into the European Union in 2015.
