A woman receives medical assistance after disembarking a boat at the Brindisi harbour in southern Italy, following rescue operations of immigrants off the coasts of Sicily on Monday.

DPA/AFP/Geneva

Three hundred migrants were trapped below deck and drowned immediately when a ship went down in the Mediterranean earlier this month, survivors were quoted as saying yesterday as they described a disaster that claimed almost 500.

The accounts were released yesterday by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), taken from 10 people rescued by Italian, Maltese and Greek authorities.

One survivor is a two-year-old girl. Most of the men, women and children on board were Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians and Sudanese.

The Greek coast guard said the toddler’s parents had passed her in the water to a 19-year-old Syrian woman because she was wearing a lifejacket, while they went to search for another of their children.

The woman and child survived, the parents did not.

“The mounting death toll is a blight on the reputation of the EU and its member states who must urgently act together, now, to ensure that no more men, women and children lose their lives,” said John Dalhuisen, Europe and Central Asia Director at Amnesty International.

“With hundreds of thousands fleeing war and poverty across the Middle East and Africa, the priority must be to protect lives rather than creating an impenetrable fortress,” he said.

After setting out to sea from the Egyptian port of Damietta on September 6, human traffickers rammed the boat when the Arab and North African migrants on board refused demands to switch to an apparently unsafe vessel.

“After they hit our boat, they waited to make sure that it had sunk completely before leaving. They were laughing,” one survivor told IOM.

“When the boat was first struck, one of the passengers killed himself in despair by hanging,” he added.

While 300 migrants died below deck, about 200 more clung to one another or to flotation devices trying to stay alive in the water.

Several managed to stay afloat for three days, but then started to go under as the weather conditions worsened and the area was lashed by strong winds and powerful waves.

Between 50 and 100 children under the age of 10 are missing among the passengers, IOM has calculated, based on witness accounts.

The survivors include two Palestinians from Gaza who first reported the incident in Sicily after they were rescued and brought there Saturday.

So far, only three bodies have been found, IOM spokesman Leonard Doyle said.

The smugglers were Palestinians and Egyptians, the survivors said.

Two Palestinian survivors who were taken to the Greek island of Crete said they each paid $2,000 in Gaza for the trip, destined for Italy.

The IOM said authorities are checking reports of a second shipwreck involving another 200 missing migrants off the Libyan coast.

The number of migrants who have drowned this year as they tried to make it across the Mediterranean to Europe is approaching 3,000, according to the organisation.

“The numbers dying off Europe’s coasts are shocking and unacceptable,” IOM’s director-general, William Lacy Swing, said.

“The risks they take reflect their desperation and we cannot keep abandoning them to their fate,” he added.

The European Union should do more to fight migrant smuggling and create legal ways for migrants to reach the bloc, said its home affairs commissioner, Cecilia Malmstrom.

“I am shocked by the testimonies of the survivors,” she said in a statement. “This new death toll clearly illustrates that smugglers and criminals have no respect for human lives and we must urgently increase our efforts to fight them.”

The European Commission, the EU’s executive, is working on “an EU plan to tackle migrant smuggling”, including through more co-operation and intelligence sharing, the commissioner said.

“Such efforts must be accompanied by a willingness by member states to create more legal ways to Europe, such as accepting more resettled refugees,” Malmstrom added.