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500 people feared dead in shipwreck

<p>As many as 500 migrants may have died trying to get to Europe across the Mediterranean Sea.</p><p>The&nbsp;<a href="http://www.unhcr.org/57177c199.html" target="_blank">United Nations Refugee Agency</a>&nbsp;said Wednesday that 41 people survived the shipwreck in mid-April. Survivors said smugglers were attempting to transfer people from a smaller ship to a larger one that was already overcrowded.</p><p>That&#39;s when the bigger boat overturned and sank. The survivors were either still on the smaller ship or managed to swim from the larger vessel to the smaller one.</p><p>The survivors were from Somalia, Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan. The U.N. said the shipwreck was &quot;one of the worst tragedies&quot; involving migrants in the past year.</p><p><i>This video includes clips from&nbsp;</i><a href="https://twitter.com/ItalianNavy" target="_blank"><i>SOS Mediterranee</i></a><i>&nbsp;and images from&nbsp;</i><a href="https://twitter.com/ItalianNavy" target="_blank"><i>Twitter / @ItalianNavy</i></a><i>.</i></p>
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STRASBOURG, France (AP) — The U.N. refugee agency says up to 500 people are feared dead in a shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea last week.

UNHCR says the disaster happened in the waters between Italy and Libya, based on accounts from 41 survivors who were rescued on April 16 by a merchant ship.

The survivors said they had been among 100 to 200 people who left a town near Tobruk, Libya, on a smugglers' boat last week. The agency says Wednesday that "after sailing for several hours, the smugglers in charge of the boat attempted to transfer the passengers to a larger ship carrying hundreds of people in terribly overcrowded conditions."

The agency says "at one point during the transfer, the larger boat capsized and sank."
 

Associated Press 2016