Ghanaian immigrants drown in italy

More than 100 people have died and hundreds more are missing after a boat carrying African migrants, mostly from Eritrea, sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa.

 The mayor of Lampedusa, Giusy Nicolini, said the death toll from the sinking on Thursday was expected to rise. "It's horrific, like a cemetery, they are still bringing them out," she said.

More than 150 people were rescued but several hundred others are still unaccounted for, according to the Associated Press.

 "We need only caskets, certainly not ambulances," Pietro Bartolo, the chief of health services on the island, told Radio 24.

 Al Jazeera's Sonia Gallego, reporting from Rome, said the boat was carrying about 500 migrants from Eritrea, Somalia and Ghana.

 "Italian officials described that many of these people had been in the water since the early hours of this morning and that it was a race against time to rescue as many of them as possible," she said.

 "It appears that there was a malfunction on board and the migrants were believed to have created a small fire on board to attract the attention of the coastguard. What we can gauge from what the survivors have been saying is that the fire caused panic on board, which caused the boat to flip over."

Rescue operation

 It is believed the ship caught fire after those on board set off flares to alert passing vessels and people on the coast of their presence. It then capsized.

 Four coastguard and police vessels and two helicopters were in the area of the accident. A submerged vessel of about 20m in length had been identified in the water after it caught fire and sank, officials said.

 Coastguard official Floriana Segreto said rescue operations were continuing.

 The boat is believed to have set off from in Libya on Tuesday. A fishing boat raised the alarm at around 7:20am on Thursday (05:20GMT) and began pulling people out of the water before coastguard vessels arrived.

 It sank just four days after 13 migrants drowned when their boat foundered off eastern Sicily.

 Transport Minister Maurizio Lupi said more needed to be done to combat people-traffickers who put migrants in crowded and unsafe vessels.

'Despicable practices'

 Speaking to Al Jazeera, Judith Sunderland, from the Human Rights Watch, said that people would continue to risk their lives in the crossing.

 "This is testament to the desperation they feel," she said. "There's no doubt that people will continue to risk their lives and that people smugglers will continue to engage in absolutely despicable practices."

 Thousands of migrants from Africa arrive in Italy on unsafe, overcrowded vessels every year, with most coming to Lampedusa, a tiny island just 113 kilometres from the coast of Tunisia.

 Numbers have been boosted this year by thousands of refugees from the civil war in Syria, most of whom have arrived on the eastern coast of Sicily from Egypt.

 “The waters around the small island of Lampedusa have again tragically become a graveyard for migrants. These grim events keep repeating themselves as thousands of people make the perilous trip across the Mediterranean to seek protection or a better life,” said Nicolas Beger, Director of Amnesty International’s European Institutions Office.

 “It is high time the Italian authorities and the EU increase their search-and-rescue capacity and cooperation in the Mediterranean Sea, rather than concentrating resources on closing off the borders. More must be done to prevent further loss of life in the future."

 Another boat carrying more than 460 migrants arrived in Lampedusa shortly before today’s shipwreck. Those on board are now housed at the island’s centre for migrants, which currently hosts some 700 people.