More Distress Calls From Migrant Boats In Med

Italian and Maltese ships are responding to distress calls from two boats with hundreds of migrants on board off Libya.

The calls were made from an inflatable life raft with 100 to 150 migrants on board and a boat carrying about 300 people, said Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

Hours later it remained unclear how the Mediterranean rescue operations were going.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said one of the callers reported that 20 people had been killed as the boat sank in international waters.

In a separate incident, at least three people, including a child, were killed when a boat carrying migrants ran aground off the coast of the Greek island of Rhodes.

Video footage showed the wooden double-masted boat, with people packing the deck, rocking wildly in the Aegean Sea just metres away from the island.

Passengers can be seen jumping into the sea and swimming towards the shore, as coast guard officers and onlookers climb down rocks to rescue the migrants, including a child wearing a lifejacket.

The Greek coast guard said it had received an emergency call from the boat, which was a wooden gulet.

Authorities said 93 people were rescued from the boat. Thirty have been taken to hospital for treatment and a search and rescue operation is ongoing in the area to try and locate any other survivors.

The nationality of the migrants is not immediately known, but the boat set off from Turkey.

The fresh emergencies came after a sinking at the weekend that could be the Mediterranean's deadliest migrant tragedy.

As many as 950 people are feared drowned after a smuggler's boat sank off Libya.

Body bags containing the corpses of 24 refugees who drowned arrived in Malta on Monday.

Some 28 survivors of the disaster were also on board Italian coast guard vessel Bruno Gregoracci as it docked in Valletta's Grand Harbour.

The search for more survivors is continuing, but it has emerged that hundreds of the migrants on the boat were locked below deck.

Italian prosecutor Giovanni Salvi said "a few hundred were forced into the hold and they were locked in and prevented from coming out."

European leaders are coming under growing pressure to tackle people-smugglers following the tragedy.

An emergency EU summit will be held on Thursday to discuss a joint response to the growing migrant crisis in the Mediterranean.

There has been a recent surge in people trying to reach European shores from the Turkish and North African coastlines as they flee conflict and poverty in the Middle East and Africa.