Boats from North Africa have been arriving almost daily in Lampedusa Nato has denied claims by a British newspaper that its naval units left dozens of migrants aboard a drifting boat in the Mediterranean to die.
It said it was unaware of the plight of the boat, which reportedly was adrift for more than two weeks.
The Guardian newspaper said 61 of the 72 people on board the boat died of hunger or thirst, despite being spotted by a military helicopter and Nato ship.
Meanwhile officials say a ship carrying 600 people sank off Libya last week.
Laura Boldrini of the UNHCR refugee agency said witnesses had seen the ship break apart on rocks on the Libyan coast, shortly after leaving, and that bodies were seen floating in the sea. She said it was not known how many of those on board were killed.
The smaller boat left Tripoli in Libya on 25 March, hoping to make it to Italy.
But it ran out of fuel and started drifting. Eventually food and water ran out, too.
The Guardian quotes a man, Abu Kurke, who it says was aboard the boat.
“Every morning we would wake up and find more bodies, which we would leave for 24 hours and then throw overboard,” he said.
The dead included mothers and babies, he added.
Those on board the boat made contact with a priest in Italy, Father Mussie Zerai, who often plays a key role assisting migrants who hit trouble. They called him on 26 March, the day after they set sail.
He confirmed to the BBC that he had alerted Italian coastguards, who said they would take action. But he lost contact with the boat when its phone battery went dead.
Abu Kurke said that shortly afterwards a helicopter appeared and dropped bottles of water and packets of biscuits onto the boat – but that after that, no further help arrived.
At one point – on 29 or 30 March, the Guardian says – the boat drifted close to an aircraft carrier. Survivors contacted by the paper said two jets took off and flew low overhead, while the migrants held two starving babies aloft. But no effort was made to assist them.
The Guardian said its inquiries suggested the ship must have been the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle.
However, Nato said in a statement: “Only one aircraft carrier was under Nato command on those dates, the Italian ship Garibaldi. Throughout the period in question, the Garibaldi was operating over 100 nautical miles out to sea. Therefore, any claims that a Nato aircraft carrier spotted and then ignored the vessel in distress are wrong.”
The Nato statement referred to the fact that the boat was supposed to be in “an unspecified location between Tripoli and [the Italian island of] Lampedusa” – and not 100 miles out to sea.
Nato said its vessels were fully aware of their responsibilities to assist vessels in distress – and indeed had rescued more than 500 people in two incidents off Tripoli on 26-27 March.
But the UNHCR’s Ms Boldrini told the BBC World Service it was “scary and concerning” that a boat could drift for so long in the Mediterranean without being picked up by any of the numerous military and commercial vessels operating there.
“This thing shouldn’t ever happen,” she said.
Up to 30,000 people are thought to have made the journey from Libya and Tunisia to Italy so far this year, driven by civil unrest and enabled by a collapse in emigration controls.
Italy has called for help in dealing with the influx, which has overwhelmed its tiny island of Lampedusa.
This weekend, more than 400 migrants from Libya had to be rescued by Italian coastguards after their fishing boat hit rocks on Lampedusa.
TV images of the dramatic night-time rescue showed some migrants jumping or falling into the sea.
On Sunday Pope Benedict XVI urged people in Catholic Italy to show more tolerance towards migrants from north Africa.
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