Over 5,000 people died in the Mediterranean Sea attempting to make the crossing to Europe last year
Over 5,000 people died in the Mediterranean Sea attempting to make the crossing to Europe in 2016, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said last month.
IOM said the number of deaths recorded up to December 21 stood at 4,913, an average of 14 per day across the year.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) noted that it is the worst annual death toll ever seen.
UHNCR also reported that around 100 deaths were feared on December 22 when two dinghies collapsed, bringing the year's total deaths to over 5,000.
2016 also saw a much greater percentage of deaths compared to 2015. According to UNHCR, over a million people crossed the Mediterranean in 2015 and 3,771 deaths were recorded.
IOM reported that while deaths were up, the number of migrants and refugees who entered Europe by sea up to December 21 last year was down to 358,403.
IOM said it believes many more deaths at sea may have gone unreported in 2016, particularly between North Africa to Spain, where data collection has been sporadic and many smaller vessels are believed to have been lost without detection.
IOM Rome spokesperson Flavio Di Giacomo said: "In 2016 the number of arrivals by sea in Italy has kept growing, but the number of migrants dying is up dramatically: over 5,000 people have died in 2016, compared to 3,777 deaths registered in the same period last year. That is nearly more than 2,000 more than in 2014, another year when over 3,000 men, women and children were lost on this dangerous passage."
Di Giacomo added that the number of shipwrecks was increasing due to the poor state of the boats used by the migrants, compounded by harsh weather conditions at sea in winter.
"We are seeing more migrants crossing this winter. This trend confirms the fact that conditions in Libya are becoming increasingly dangerous for migrants, who are often trying to flee the country in order to save their lives," he said.
"Many people have told us that they didn't want to come to Europe when they left their country of origin. For many of them the destination country was Libya. But what they found there was abuse and violence. As a consequence, they decided to try the sea crossing, putting their lives in the hands of unscrupulous smugglers, who forced them to embark on vessels unfit to sail. These shipwrecks cannot be therefore considered mere 'incidents.' They are the consequence of criminal behaviour by smugglers."
UNHCR said the causes for the alarming increase in deaths in 2015 were multiple but appeared to be related to the declining quality of the vessels used by people smugglers, the vagaries of the weather and the tactics used by smugglers to avoid detection by the authorities. These include sending large numbers of embarkations simultaneously, which makes the work of rescuers more difficult.