DHAKA: About 400 migrants have died in an attempt to reach Italy from Libya when their boat capsized, survivors said on Tuesday.

The tragedy was the latest in the Mediterranean where the death toll from shipwrecks has surged this year.

The boat, carrying about 550 migrants, flipped about 24 hours after leaving the Libyan coast, according to some of the 150 survivors who were rescued and brought to a southern Italian port on Tuesday morning, Save the Children reported.

The survivors of the latest shipwreck were mostly sub-Saharan Africans, but no further details were available, a Save the Children spokesman said.

The International Organisation for Migration's (IOM) spokesman in Italy, Flavio Di Giacomo, said his organisation interviewed several survivors, who said there were between 500 and 550 people on board when the ship sank.

"We are continuing to investigate in order to understand how the shipwreck happened," Di Giacomo said.

Before this incident, more than 500 migrants died while crossing the Mediterranean from Africa this year, up sharply from 47 in the same period of 2014, the IOM said.

The Italian coastguard said its teams had saved nearly 8,000 people at sea during a series of rescue operations since Friday.

Source: abc.net.au

BDST: 0839 HRS, APR 15, 2015
RS