Ship With Libyan Refugees Sinks

The AP reports:

An overcrowded ship carrying up to 600 people trying to flee Libya sank just outside the port of Tripoli, the U.N. refugee agency said Monday, citing witness accounts.

Aid officials were still trying to confirm the fate of those people after the vessel broke apart Friday in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya, UNHCR spokeswoman Laura Boldrini said.

Witnesses who left the Libyan capital on another boat shortly afterward reported seeing remnants of the sunken ship and the bodies of some passengers floating in the sea, she told The Associated Press.

Other witnesses saw passengers swimming to shore but it was unclear how many survived, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Its staff on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa interviewed a Somali woman who said she lost her four-month-old baby in the sinking. The woman swam to shore and managed to board another boat heading to Italy, the IOM said in a statement Monday.

At least three other boats that left Libya in late March have disappeared, with hundreds feared dead, Boldrini said.

The number of people fleeing North Africa has soared since mid-January, after Tunisia overthrew its longtime dictator and set off a series of uprisings in Egypt and Libya. Some 25,000 people, mostly Tunisians, have flooded Lampedusa, which is right off the North African coast.

Since fighting began in Libya in mid-February, the IOM estimates that another 10,000 people have reached Lampedusa or the neighboring island of Linosa from Libya — including almost 2,000 who arrived on five boats last weekend.

Many of those fleeing Libya are foreign workers from sub-Sahara Africa, who in the first weeks of the war were mistaken for mercenaries funded by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and attacked by Libyan rebels.