ROME -- A smuggler's boat crammed with hundreds of people overturned off Libya's coast as rescuers approached in the Mediterranean, intensifying pressure on the European Union on Sunday to finally meet demands for decisive action.
The fatal shipwreck accentuated what has become a migration crisis for Europe, as warmer spring weather has unleashed a torrent of smugglers' boats, mostly from Libya, toward Italy and Greece. Even before this weekend's sinking, humanitarian groups estimated that roughly 900 refugees had already died this year -- compared with 90 during the same period a year ago.
That figure could rise sharply. Italian prosecutors said a Bangladeshi survivor flown to Sicily for treatment told them 950 people were aboard, including hundreds who had been locked in the hold by smugglers. Earlier, authorities said a survivor told them 700 refugees were on board.
It wasn't immediately clear whether they were referring to the same survivor, and Premier Matteo Renzi said Italian authorities were "not in a position to confirm or verify" the death toll.
Eighteen ships joined the rescue effort, but only 28 survivors and 24 bodies were pulled from the water by nightfall, Renzi said.
These small numbers make more sense if hundreds of people were locked in the hold, because with so much weight down below, "surely the boat would have sunk," said Gen. Antonino Iraso, of the Italian Border Police, which has deployed boats in the operation.
Prosecutor Giovanni Salvi said by phone from the city of Catania that a survivor from Bangladesh described the situation on the fishing boat to prosecutors who interviewed him in a hospital. The man said about 300 people were locked in the hold when the fishing boat overturned, and that about 200 women and dozens of children also were on board.
Salvi stressed that there was no confirmation yet of the man's account and that the investigation was ongoing.
Iraso said the sea in the area is too deep for divers, suggesting that the final toll may never be known. The sea off Libya runs as deep as 3 miles or more.
Resurgent right-wing political parties have made a rallying cry out of a rising tide of illegal migration. So far this year, 35,000 asylum seekers and migrants have reached Europe and more than 900 are known to have died trying.
The rising death toll is renewing criticism of the European response, especially the Triton program, introduced last November to patrol the Mediterranean and rescue refugees. U.N. officials and humanitarian groups have argued that Triton is too limited in scope and resources and thus is placing refugees at grave risk.
With Sunday's tragedy, demands for decisive action were going mainstream, as authorities from France, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom joined calls for a unified response.
"How can it be that we daily are witnessing a tragedy?" asked Renzi, who strategized with his top ministers ahead of Monday's European Union meeting in Luxembourg, where foreign ministers scrambled to add stopping the smugglers to their agenda.
"Europe can do more and Europe must do more," said Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament. "It is a shame and a confession of failure how many countries run away from responsibility and how little money we provide for rescue missions."
Europe must mobilize "more ships, more overflights by aircraft," French President Francois Hollande told French TV Canal Plus on Sunday.
Renzi said he too wants action on human traffickers who smuggle refugees on rickety ships, describing them as "the slave drivers of the 21st century," but he rejected calls by some Italian lawmakers for a naval blockade. That would only "wind up helping the smugglers" since military ships would be there to rescue any refugees, and they wouldn't be able to return passengers to chaos and violence in Libya.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the latest tragedy is an urgent reminder "of the critical need for a robust search and rescue capacity in the Mediterranean," in a statement released late Sunday by his spokesman. Ban said the Mediterranean has become "the world's deadliest route used by asylum seekers and migrants."
Meanwhile Sunday, rescuers were "checking who is alive and who is dead" in an area littered with debris and oil from the capsized ship. Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, whose island nation joined the effort, said only 50 survived, and called it the "biggest human tragedy of the last few years."
Italian officials say they received an emergency call Saturday night that a large refugee boat had been spotted 70 miles off the Libyan coast, and about 130 miles from the Italian island of Lampedusa. As often happens, the Italian authorities ordered the commercial ship closest to the scene -- in this case, the freighter King Jacob -- to respond until rescue ships could arrive. But when the King Jacob came in view of the 66-foot boat early Sunday morning, those on board apparently rushed to one side, possibly causing it to overturn, according to Italian and Maltese officials.
Asked whether refugees rushed to one side as the Portuguese vessel pulled close, Iraso told Sky TG24 TV that "the dynamics aren't clear. But this is not the first time that has happened."
Muscat said this ship had multiple tiers and was teeming with people. Maltese rescuers reported seeing bodies floating and sinking in the water.
King Jacob's crew "immediately deployed rescue boats, gangway, nets and life rings," a spokesman for the ship's owner said.
By midday Sunday, more than 17 vessels were searching for survivors, led by the Italian coast guard, vessels in the Triton program and several merchant boats.
Desperate refugees fleeing war, persecution and conflict in Africa, the Middle East and Asia have long tried to reach Europe. Libya has increasingly become a more frequent point of departure in the years since rival militias, tribal factions and other political forces destabilized the country after the bloody end of Moammar Gadhafi's dictatorship.
"The amount of people we've seen coming, and how it has been organized in the past few months, is unprecedented," Muscat said in a telephone interview. "We've just seen ... people die. If we don't get our act together on Libya, we'll see more."
Malta and Italy are closest to the Libyan coast, and have received the brunt of a refugee tide that carried 219,000 people from Africa to Europe last year. Some 3,500 are known to have died along the way, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said in a statement Sunday.
Information for this article was contributed by Frances D'Emilio, Nicole Winfield, Stephen Calleja, Sylvie Corbet, Harold Heckle, Barry Hatton, Raf Casert and Alessandra Tarantino of The Associated Press and by Jim Yardley and Gaia Pianigiani of The New York Times.
A Section on 04/20/2015