TheCable

Less than 24 hours after the capsize of a boat conveying about 700 people on the Mediterranean Sea, another boat with 300 people aboard is currently sinking.

BBC quoted the international organisation for migration as saying it had received a distress call from a sinking boat carrying 300 migrants in the Mediterranean.

Some 20 people are reported to have died, a spokesman for the migration agency said, with the distressed caller saying about three boats needed help in international waters.

On Sunday, 700 people were feared dead after a vehicular capsize on the sea, necessitating urgent attention by the European Union (EU).

EU ministers are due to meet in Luxembourg later on Monday to discuss the migrant crisis after hundreds of people drowned at the weekend when their boat sank off the coast of Libya.

Federica Mogherini, the EU foreign policy chief, has said Europe has a moral duty to act in the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean.

“We have a political and moral duty to exercise our role. The Mediterranean is our sea and we have to act together as Europeans,” he said.

“It is also [in] our interest, [and that] of our credibility that the European Union was built and is built around the protection of human rights, human dignity and the life of human people – we need to be consistent in that.”

The UN says the route from North Africa to Italy and Malta has become the world’s deadliest.