Migrant boat carrying hundreds sinks off Italian coast

A boat carrying hundreds of migrants has sunk off the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, killing at least 14, Italian authorities said on Monday, a day after dozens were drowned while trying to make the crossing from North Africa to Europe. 

An Italian navy spokesman said vessels from the Mare Nostrum task force, set up after hundreds of people drowned in migrant boat disasters last year, were on their way to the site of the sinking. 

Some Italian news reports said as many as 400 migrants were aboard. The Italian navy said that 200 migrants have been rescued. Other details, including the nationalities of the passengers, were not immediately clear.

Italy has struggled for decades with a steady stream of migrants traveling in small, unsafe boats from North Africa to the tiny island of Lampedusa, midway between Tunisia and Sicily. 

The flow has intensified since the Arab Spring upheavals of 2011 and the civil war in Syria, with well over 25,000 arriving in the first few months of this year. 

In the past week alone, more than 4,000 migrants have reached Italy's shores, arriving in smugglers' boats. Many of the boats set out from Libya's loosely patrolled coast with migrants that are fleeing wars or hardship in Syria, Eritrea and elsewhere.

Libyan Navy spokesman Col. Ayoub Qassem said numbers leaving had increased in the past few days but authorities did not know why. 

Hundreds were drowned in two separate disasters last year that prompted the government to step up air and marine patrols of the seas south of Sicily. 

On Sunday, a least 40 people died and 51 others were rescued after a boat carrying mostly sub-Saharan African migrants sank off Libya's coast east of Tripoli.

Wire services