VALLETTA, Oct 12: Rescuers plucked 200 refugees from the sea on Saturday after their boat capsized, killing 31 in yet another migrant tragedy that prompted Malta to warn the Mediterranean was turning into a cemetery.

Their boat went down off Malta on Friday near the Italian island of Lampedusa, packed with 230 to 250 men, women and children, the Maltese navy said.

“The latest figure we have is 31” dead, a Maltese government spokesman said.

The Italian navy earlier gave the figure of 34 dead.

Exhausted after a 10-hour journey from the wreck site, about 143 survivors arrived in Valetta morning aboard a Maltese naval vessel. They were helped onto buses to be driven to shelters.

Among the 146 survivors questioned by the Maltese authorities so far, 117 said they were from war-torn Syria and 27 from the Palestinian territories, an interior ministry spokesman said.

Fifty-six more survivors were being escorted to Porto Empedocle in Sicily on an Italian naval vessel. Another nine were airlifted to Lampedusa, including a couple with a nine-month-old baby whose three-year-old brother drowned, emergency services said.The captain of the Maltese patrol boat which was first to reach migrants at sea soon after their boat capsized recounted what he described as the toughest rescue of his career.

“I have been doing this job for nearly 10 years and this must have been the most difficult operation I was involved in. There were hundreds of people at sea. Some we could see floating, lifeless,” he told the Times of Malta daily.

The sinking came just over a week after the deadliest refugee disaster to date in the region prompted the European Union to call for sea patrols to cope with the flood of migrants knocking on its doors.

Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta called the latest tragedy “a new and dramatic confirmation of the state of emergency”.

“We are just building a cemetery within our Mediterranean Sea,” his Maltese counterpart, Joseph Muscat, warned at a press conference on Friday, calling for more help from the rest of Europe.

Both the Maltese and Italian navies dispatched rescue ships and helicopters to the area, around 100 kilometres south of Lampedusa and 110 kilometres from Malta.—AFP