Roundup: 330 migrants feared dead in Mediterranean wreckage

More than 300 migrants are feared to have died in the latest fatal crossing from the Libyan coast to Italy, local reports said on Wednesday.

The total number of victims among the around 420 migrants who left Libya last Saturday on four inflatable boats could be about 330, according to survivors cited by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) spokesman in Italy Flavio Di Giacomo.

The estimated victims include 29 migrants who died by hypothermia after one of the four boats carrying 105 people was reached on Monday by the Italian coast guard, which brought 76 survivors to the island of Lampedusa, between Libya and Sicily.

Another nine migrants survived the wreckage of two other boats, which were also carrying more than 100 people each, and were saved by a merchant vessel, bringing the total number of survivors to 85.

The fourth boat, also with around 100 migrants onboard according to survivors, was not found, Di Giacomo told ANSA news agency.

An IOM team was at work in Lampedusa to take care of the survivors at a migration center.

"All of them are young men, aged around 25 on average, coming from subsaharan countries," Di Giacomo explained.

He said the migrants were threatened with sticks and guns, and forced by people traffickers to get in the inflatable boats despite the prohibitive weather conditions, with waves as much as eight meter high.

"They were sent to die," the spokesman stressed.

More than 218,000 migrants crossed the Mediterranean by irregular routes last year and about 3,500 lost their lives in the attempt, according to the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR, which following the new disaster urged the beefing of up search and rescue capacity.

On Wednesday, the Council of Europe echoed UNHCR saying that Triton, the operation run by the European Union border agency Frontex which replaced Italy's full-scale search-and-rescue mission Mare Nostrum in November, was not suitable for the migrant emergency.

"Europe needs an effective search and rescue system," human rights commissioner of the Council of Europe Nils Muiznieks said in a statement. He called the latest deaths "another preventable tragedy on the Mediterranean."

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi stressed, however, that addressing the migrant problem in Libya must be the central issue to prevent more tragedies from happening.

"The problem does not lie in Mare Nostrum or Triton," Renzi told Sky television on Wednesday.

"You can ask Europe to do more and tomorrow I will do that, but the political point is to solve the problem in Libya, where the situation is out of control," he underlined. Endit