The vessel, crammed with 108 tired and frightened irregular migrants, was spotted, after hours of searching, by an Italian military aeroplane on its return to base for re-fuelling. It reportedly noticed a feeble torch being waved around by a migrant.

Soon after it was towed to Sfax, a port in Tunisia, by a merchant vessel with the migrants on board. Two children were reportedly seen holding on to one woman’s legs and the third child was in her arms.

The irregular migrants had been in trouble since Thursday, and were officially dispersed and feared dead for almost 24 hours after rescue operations failed due to the bad weather and the gale force 7 winds. Although the migrants had been spotted earlier that day, the high winds, and three-metre waves soon lost them from sight, contact was lost and rescue efforts called off by the Maltese authorities at 2pm on Friday.

“SOS. Help! We are in difficulty, we risk being engulfed by the waves...” using a satellite phone, an agitated Eritrean woman on board the vessel told a relative of hers working in Italy on Thursday afternoon.

Immediately after the distress call, a rescue operation by the AFM from Malta and four Nato warships from Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and the US, and two aircraft from Italy and the US started their search for the migrants.

When the vessel was first sighted, it was 100 nautical miles southwest of Malta. But at 2pm on Friday the AFM halted their search due to bad weather conditions.

Meanwhile, the other rescue operations continued, and when the vessel was spotted by the Italian plane, the captain of the Tunisian vessel which was only five miles away from the migrants was given instructions to sail towards the migrants and save them.

Many are now questioning why the AFM stopped their rescue search so early in the afternoon. A report published in yesterday’s issue of Corriere Della Sera, claims the AFM had “surprisingly” stopped their search for the migrants.

This newspaper contacted the AFM for its comments yesterday morning, but until this newspaper went to print no reply, or further details on the rescue operation had been received.

Meanwhile the AFM issued the following press release yesterday morning. “On Friday 16th April 2004, at about 11pm, the AFM Rescue Coordination Centre was informed by the Rescue Coordination Centre, in Rome, that the lost boat with the 96 immigrants was found by a Tunisian merchant vessel about 30 miles west of the Italian island of Lampedusa. The immigrants were taken on board a Tunisian merchant vessel to a port in Tunisia.”

However, when contacted by BBC World News on Friday, Captain Andrew Mallia told BBC at the time, “It is improbable anyone has survived.”