Italian police today arrested the captain and first mate of a boat involved in the Mediterranean's deadliest disaster in decades on suspicion of murder, causing a shipwreck and involvement in illegal immigration.
The two seamen, who have not been formally charged, were being held as part of a probe into a catastrophe that has evoked chilling comparisons with the slave trade and allegations of callous disregard on the part of European governments.
As the UN's refugee body said at least 800 people had died following Sunday's capsizing of an impossibly overcrowded fishing boat off Libya, authorities in Sicily said they had detained the boat's Tunisian skipper and his Syrian number two.
Hundreds of the victims, including an unknown number of children, will have died in horrific circumstances having been locked in the hold or the middle deck of the 20-metre (66-foot) boat which keeled over in pitch darkness as a Portuguese container ship arrived to answer its distress call.
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on Monday described the traffickers who packed their human cargo into the boat as akin to 18th-century slave traders.
The UN human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said the horror at sea had been produced by a "monumental failure of compassion" on the part of European governments who are now under intense pressure to address the humanitarian crisis on their southern shores.
The first of the 27 survivors who disembarked here in the early hours did so in a wheelchair. All of them were deeply traumatised, said Carlotta Sami, spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
"They are exhausted, they have nothing left," she said. "They are in a state of shock, they look completely lost."
Most of the survivors and the victims appear to have been young men but there were also several children aged between 10 and 12, she added.
"We have not yet been able to ask them about this but it seems certain that many of them will have had friends and family who were lost in the wreck."
At talks in Luxembourg yesterday, EU ministers agreed on a 10-point plan to double the resources available to the bloc's much-criticised maritime border patrol mission Triton and further measures will be discussed at a summit of EU leaders on Thursday.
The survivors, who hailed from Mali, Gambia, Senegal, Somalia, Eritrea and Bangladesh, were all recovering today at holding centres near Catania on Sicily's eastern coast.
Sunday's disaster was the worst in a series of migrant shipwrecks that have claimed more than 1,700 lives this year and nearly 5,000 since the start of 2014.
