Ramming of migrant boat an act of 'mass murder'

People smugglers who allegedly sank a boat killing up to 500 migrants are probably guilty of "mass murder" and should be brought to justice, the UN's new rights chief said yesterday.

"The callous act of deliberately ramming a boat full of hundreds of defenceless people is a crime that must not go unpunished," Zeid Ra'ad Zeid al-Hussein said. "If the survivors' accounts are indeed true - and they appear all too credible - we are looking at what amounts to mass murder in the Mediterranean."

In one of the deadliest migrant shipwrecks on record, some 500 migrants including up to 100 children drowned after smugglers sank their ship last week when the Syrian, Palestinian, Egyptian, Sudanese and other passengers refused to change to a smaller vessel on their way to Italy, survivors said.

Just 11 people survived the incident off Malta, with some of them saying their boat was intentionally sunk by the smugglers, said to be Palestinians and Egyptians.

"This is a truly horrendous incident," Zeid said, emphasising that countries circling the Mediterranean had a duty "to clamp down on the smugglers who are exploiting one of the most vulnerable groups on the planet and endangering their lives, virtually on a daily basis, purely for financial gain."

In addition to finding and punishing the perpetrators, countries worldwide must address the root causes of such tragedies, said Zeid, who took over as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights earlier this month.