100 feared dead

A hundred migrants were feared drowned yesterday after yet another migrant shipwreck off the Libyan coast, raising the number of those missing feared drowned this week to 340.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said around 100 people were believed to have drowned in the Mediterranean on Wednesday, according to 27 migrants who had been plucked to safety and were being brought to Italy.

The surviving group, all men, said they had set sail from a beach close to Tripoli before dawn on Monday. After several hours the traffickers travelling with them aboard a separate boat took their engine and left them to their fate, without a satellite phone to call for help.

The overcrowded dinghy began rapidly taking on water and deflated. Tossed for two days and nights on rough seas, some passengers fell overboard, while others succumbed to exhaustion.

By the time the British military ship Enterprise -- engaged in the anti-trafficking Sofia operation -- found them, they discovered just 27 people alive, clinging to what was left of the dinghy.

Once rescued by the Enterprise the migrants, who come from Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Senegal and Sierra Leone, were transferred to the MSF's Bourbon Argos, along with six bodies retrieved from around the dinghy.

The shipwreck was just the latest in a series of tragedies this week: on Monday, 15 people were rescued from a dinghy that had been carrying some 150 people, while on Tuesday 23 were found on another boat that initially had 122 aboard.

Since the start of the year, over 167,000 people have been brought to safety in Italy, a figure that has already passed the 153,000 number recorded in 2015 and is closing in on the 170,000 figure recorded in 2014.