Mohammed Ahmed stood on deck keeping count as other would-be refugees from Libya crowded onto the smuggler's boat in groups of 10. When the Somali engineer's tally passed 400, he began to fear for his and his wife's safety and raised his voice in alarm.
"The boat is too full!" he warned Libyan traffickers on the dock, who he said ignored him and packed, amid growing disorder, another 300 to 400 migrants onto the 69-foot (21-meter) vessel.
Then, as the sense of danger spread and some passengers tried to fight their way off, the traffickers cut the vessel loose into Tripoli harbor, he said.
Hundreds of migrants, most of them from sub-Saharan Africa, are believed to have drowned when the vessel capsized and sank in the Mediterranean a few hundred yards from the city's port shortly before dawn last Friday, making it one of the deadliest disasters in the flight from Libya's 12-week-old conflict.
Mr. Ahmed and two other Somali survivors said Wednesday that the vessel, which appeared to be a motorized trawler made top-heavy by passengers crowded atop the pilot house, veered sharply left and right as it headed into a calm sea, then listed badly starboard and sank within minutes.
As passengers cried out in prayer and spilled into the Mediterranean, Mr. Ahmed and his wife Farah, who is nine months pregnant, said they thrashed through the water to find each other, then clung together until government patrol boats rescued them.
Ms. Ahmed, unable to swim, said she was saved by a life vest she had bought for the voyage.
The couple, who with several other survivors have taken shelter at the Somali Embassy here, said the ill-fated vessel was loaded and sailed from port in full view of uniformed border guards. Until the conflict began in mid-February, border guards had worked to prevent such clandestine voyages.
The survivors' accounts appeared to support assertions by the Italian government and international aid officials that Libyan authorities are tolerating the exodus of thousands of African migrant workers on overcrowded vessels bound for Europe.
A Libyan government spokesman, Moussa Ibrahim, suggested that illegal immigration is the price European countries would pay for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's support for rebels fighting to overthrow Col. Moammar Gadhafi.
"Because of the NATO aggression against our country and because our coastal border guard is being hit daily…we are unable to deal with this situation," he said. "We cannot be the guards of Europe at this moment."
The Libyan government has yet to give an accounting of the tragedy in the harbor, making the death toll hard to pin down.
Somalia's charge d'affairs in Tripoli, Abdulghani M. Waeis, said 16 of 264 Somalis aboard were confirmed dead, 38 others were missing, and the rest had swum ashore or were rescued.
Mr. Waeis said he had seen the bodies of two other Africans along with those of the 16 Somalis lined up in the port wrapped in blankets. Three of the dead Somalis were children, he said.
The Geneva-based International Organization for Migration, or IOM, said a survivor from Bangladesh had reported that 18 passengers from his country were missing.
According to Mr. Ahmed and the IOM account, at least 250 passengers were trapped below deck when the vessel capsized.
Mr. Ahmed said it is unlikely that many of them could have crawled through the two tiny hatches and survived. In addition, he reported having seen many lifeless bodies in the water and no more than 200 survivors onshore.
More than 800 people fleeing the conflict are believed to have drowned in the Mediterranean, not counting Friday's disaster, but including the 330 people on a boat that vanished after leaving Libya on March 22, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
Most of those leaving had migrated from poorer African countries for work in Libya and then lost their livelihoods when Libya's oil-driven economy became crippled by the fighting. Many African migrants have returned home, but Somalis fearful of civil strife in their own country are trapped. "They can't stay here and they can't go back," said Mr. Waeis, the Somali diplomat. He estimated that 1,500 of the 2,500 Somalis in Libya had left on perilous voyages to Italy since mid-March.
In an interview Wednesday at the United Nations, Somali Prime Minister Mohamed Abdulahi Mohamed said Somalis continue to flee their own country, "though they know they may not reach where they want to go.
"They want to leave, because you've got al Qaeda, al Shabab. There are close to 30 or 40 ships that sank, that killed 100 Somalis each time. Who can stay in Somalia at this time? You've got those crazy guys. If you cross them, they will chop off your head and show it in the streets so they show how harsh they can be."
Mr. Ahmed, a 33-year-old construction engineer, said his Libyan employer's building projects had come to a halt. He said he and his 28-year-old wife had paid $100 apiece to be smuggled to Italy before the expected birth of their son later this month.
Ms. Ahmed said the couple was determined to risk another voyage. "We'll go to Europe," she said. "We don't have another option."
—Joe Lauria contributed to this article.
Write to Richard Boudreaux at richard.boudreaux@wsj.com
Source: The Wall Street Journal
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