UN fears 500 migrants died in a single shipwreck last week
The UN's refugee agency believes as many as 500 people may have drowned in a shipwreck in the Mediterranean earlier this week, after their ship capsized somewhere between the coasts of Libya and Italy.
If the death toll is confirmed, it would make this tragedy the year's worst shipwreck in the Mediterranean.
A team at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced on Tuesday that they had interviewed survivors who had been rescued by a passing merchant ship and then taken to Kalamata, Greece, on April 16.
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The team believes there are 41 survivors — 37 of them are men, three of them women and one is a 3-year-old child). The group was made up of migrants from Somalia, Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan, chasing a better life in Europe.
"The survivors told us that they had been part of a group of between 100 and 200 people who departed last week from a locality near Tobruk in Libya on a 30-metre-long boat," said UNHCR in a statement.
"After sailing for several hours, the smugglers on 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."
Those who survived the wreck were believed to be still aboard the smaller vessel, or were able to swim back to it before the larger one disappeared beneath the waves.
The survivors then drifted at sea for up to three days before they were rescued and moved to temporary housing facilities.
The tragedy comes roughly one year after a fishing boat packed with nearly 800 migrants capsized, killing those trapped inside, in the worst shipwreck of its kind.
Italy is launching efforts to raise that ship and bring it to a Sicilian port.
Two suspected smugglers, a Syrian and a Tunisian, are on trial in Sicily for the April 18, 2015, wreck, where they are facing multiple counts of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and aiding illegal immigration.
Additional information from the Associated Press.
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Megan Specia was Mashable's Assistant Real-Time News Editor and joined the team in September 2014. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism & Mass Communications from the University of New Hampshire after growing up in the Jersey 'burbs. She made her way to New York via a four year stopover in Dublin. Megan previously worked as a journalist and editor at Storyful in both Dublin and New York. Before all of that, though, her claim to fame was as head cake arranger and purveyor of all things sweet at Queen of Tarts cafe in Dublin, where she developed a serious addiction to macarons.
