‘Over 1,000 killed in recent Mediterranean shipwrecks’

News of African migrants dying in shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea as they seek to reach European shores continued unabated on Monday.

The International Organization for Migration said its Rome office has received a distress call from international waters in the Mediterranean about three boats in need of help.

The IOM says the caller reported 300 people on his boat with about 20 fatalities and said the boat was sinking. The caller provided no information on the other boats.

The IOM had no additional details, including the location of the distress call.

And on the Greek island of Rhodes on Monday, video footage and photos posted by the local news website Rodiaki of the grounding of a migrant boat off the coast of the island show a large, wooden double-masted boat, people packed on board, just meters away from the island.

The vessel rocks wildly in the waves and passengers are seen in a photo jumping into the sea and swimming toward land.

In another video, about a dozen migrants sit on a floating piece of wreckage pushed toward the shore. Coast Guard officers and passers-by jump into the waves to rescue the migrants, including a young child wearing a lifejacket.

At least three people are known to have died in the incident.

An international aid agency spokeswoman has compared the scale of deaths in recent shipwrecks to the death toll in the sinking of the Titanic luxury liner more than a century ago.

Sarah Tyler, a spokeswoman for Save the Children in Catania, Sicily, said more than 1,000 people have died in the waters of the Mediterranean, adding “that is almost as many as died in the Titanic, and 31 times the number who died when the Costa Concordia sank.”

One survivor’s account has put at up to 950 the number of people on board the smuggler’s boat that sank off the coast of Libya this weekend, with only a handful rescued. Last week more than 400 people died or went missing in another shipwreck.

The Bangladeshi survivor said many of the passengers were below deck and trapped inside when the boat sank.