Official: Migrant boat sinks off Libya’s coast, kills at least 37

TRIPOLI, Libya — A boat carrying migrants sank off Libya’s Mediterranean coast, killing at least 37 people, a local official said Sunday, the second such fatal accident within days.

“We had reports this morning that there are seven bodies of illegal migrants that sank off Khoms [east of Tripoli] … but we don’t have any details how many migrants were on board,” said Mohamad al-Misrati, a spokesman for the Red Crescent in Tripoli.

Fishermen later discovered 30 more bodies in the same area near Khoms, a town some 62 miles east of the capital, he said. Volunteers of the Red Crescent were trying to recover the dead but were lacking boats.

No more details were immediately available.

On Thursday, a vessel packed with migrants hoping to make it from Libya to Italy sank in waters off the Libyan town of Zuwara, killing up to 200 people.

Lawless Libya has turned into a major transit route for migrants fleeing conflict and poverty by boat to Europe. Smugglers exploit the country’s chaos to bring Syrians into Libya via Egypt or nationals of sub-Saharan countries via Niger, Sudan and Chad.

The number of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe has passed 300,000 this year, up from 219,000 in the whole of 2014, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said on Friday.

More than 2,500 people have died making the crossing this year, not including those feared drowned off Libya in the last 24 hours, it said. That compares with 3,500 who died or went missing in the Mediterranean in 2014.

On Sunday, Germany, France and Britain pressed for better processing of migrants arriving in southern Europe and for a European Union-wide list of countries considered safe, and a special meeting of EU interior and justice ministers was called for Sept. 14.

Interior ministers Thomas de Maiziere of Germany, Bernard Cazeneuve of France and Theresa May of Britain stressed the need to set up “hot spots” in Greece and Italy by the year’s end to ensure migrants are fingerprinted and registered, allowing authorities to identify quickly those in need of protection.

They called in a statement for a special ministerial meeting in the next two weeks.