230 MIGRANTS DROWN AFTER BOAT CAPSIZES; 21 saved as smugglers' vessel sinks in storm.

Byline: MIRROR REPORTER

AT least 230 migrants are feared drowned after an overcrowded boat sank in a Mediterranean storm.

The vessel, with a capacity of just 50, had 250 people on board when it capsized about 30 miles north of the Libyan coastal town of Maleta in high winds last Friday.

A total of 21 people were rescued from the scene on Sunday and another 21 bodies retrieved.

Laurence Hart, an official of The International Organisation for Migration, said: "It is hard to imagine there are survivors among the missing by now."

This stretch of water is a favoured route for illegal migrants - many from Africa and the Middle East - hoping to reach Italy.

Officials in Libya said a second boat with about 350 migrants was rescued in the same area on Sunday.

Libyan television showed footage of this second boat, packed with migrants.

Police spokesman Col Najy Abou Harous said: "Only 21 were rescued and those were the ones who were able to swim.We found 21 other corpses. The rest are believed dead.

"The boat's capacity is 40 to 50 and the smugglers packed it with hundreds.

"These are wooden fishing boats, not for sailing." Col Harous added survivors told him the boat was in a poor condition and a hole in its hull may have caused it to sink.

Libyan police said 17 of those rescued were in poor condition because they had been in the sea for a long time without food or water.

Mr Hart claimed both vessels carried migrants from Africa and the Middle East, some of them Syrian Kurds.

He said: "One boat was rescued and is back in Tripoli. Rescue was quick because they were near an oil platform that notified the Libyan coastal guards who quickly rescued the migrants.

"I believe 240 people are missing from the second boat." Ron Redmond, chief spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, claimed this is the beginning of the smuggling season in the Mediterranean.

In Italy, port authority spokesman Capt Cosimo Nicastro claimed an Italian merchant ship, flanked by a Libyan vessel, rescued a boat carrying 350 people on Sunday morning.

The ship had received a call for help from an oil platform.

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SAVED Some of the rescued migrants ALIVE Migrants disembark on the Italian island of Lampedusa yesterday Pictures: AP