GENEVA: About 500 Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians and Sudanese are feared to have died after human traffickers rammed a vessel into their boat and it sank off the Malta coast last week, the International Organisation for Migration said on Monday.

The group of migrant workers was undertaking a perilous journey from the Egyptian port of Damietta, seeking a better life in Europe, when their boat was overtaken by human traffickers with two vessels on Wednesday, the organisation’s spokeswoman Christiane Berthiaume said.

According to the organisation’s interviews with two of the survivors, the traffickers rammed the boat carrying the migrants with one of their vessels.

The Palestinian survivors said there had been a violent confrontation between the migrants and the traffickers when latter tried to move them onto a smaller boat.

Ms Berthiaume told AP that the traffickers “used one boat to knock the other” and that there were nine known survivors in all. The two Palestinians were rescued by a Panamanian-flagged container ship which took them to Pozzallo, Italy. Seven survivors were picked up by other boats that took them to Crete, Greece, and Malta.

The spokeswoman said another boat carrying at least 250 African migrants to Europe capsized before leaving the coast near the Libyan capital on Monday and most of them were feared dead.

A coast guard spokesman, Qassim Ayoub, said dozens of bodies were being retrieved 18km off the coast of Tripoli’s Tajoura district and 36 migrants, including three women — one of them pregnant — had been rescued.

The international organisation estimates that about 2,200 people have died this year while trying to cross the Mediterranean, compared to 700 in 2013.

The figure does not include the incidents off Malta and Libya, which could put the toll close to 3,000. More than 100,000 people have been rescued since January, the UN refugee agency said.

Refugee numbers have swelled as thousands of people flee conflicts in Syria, Iraq and across the Middle East and Africa, many of them boarding unsafe smugglers’ boats in Libya.

Over the last weekend, Italian rescue operations helped save and bring to ports on both the mainland and in Sicily nearly 3,000 migrants.

The IOM said the Panamanian-flagged container ship had also rescued over 380 people who were aboard another boat that had sunk in the Mediterranean during the past week.

On Sunday, Hollywood star Angelina Jolie, a special envoy for the United Nations refugee agency, met surviving refugees in Malta and called on the world to “wake up” to the migrant crisis involving Mediterranean countries.

“There is a direct link between the conflicts in Syria and elsewhere and the rise in deaths at sea in the Mediterranean,” she was quoted as saying in a UNHCR statement.

“We have to understand what drives people to take the fearful step of risking their children’s lives on crowded, unsafe vessels. It is the overwhelming desire to find refuge,” she said.

“Unless we address the root causes of these conflicts the numbers of refugees dying or unable to find protection will continue to rise,” she added.

According to the survivors, the migrants had set out from Egypt on Sept 6 and had been forced to change boats several times.

The traffickers, who were on a separate boat, ordered them onto a smaller vessel, which many of the migrants feared was too small to hold them.

When they refused to cross over to the new boat, the furious traffickers rammed their boat until it capsized.

Both Palestinians spent a day and a half in the water, one wearing a lifejacket and the other holding on to a life buoy with other migrants, all of whom perished, including a young Egyptian boy who hoped to make money in Europe to pay for his father’s heart operation, the organisation said.

The IOM also called on the international community to crack down on traffickers, saying “the only way to render these organisations impotent is to begin to open legal canals into Europe for all those people, men, women and children, fleeing their homelands in search of shelter”.

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2014