Traffickers ‘sink’ ship carrying migrants in Mediterranean, 500 feared dead off Malta coast.

More than 700 people fleeing Africa and the West Asia may have drowned in the latest shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, bringing the death toll this year to almost 3,000, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said on Monday.

In the worst incident, as many as 500 migrants are believed to have died after traffickers rammed their ship off Malta’s coast last week, an event that only came to light this weekend in testimony from two of the nine survivors.