VIENNA -- Death and desperation mounted in Europe's migrant crisis Friday as Austrian police said 71 people appeared to have suffocated in the back of an abandoned truck, while an estimated 200 people were feared drowned off Libya when two overloaded boats capsized.
More than 300,000 refugees and other migrants have sought to cross the Mediterranean Sea so far in 2015, up from 219,000 in all of last year.
Police arrested several people believed to be part of a human-smuggling operation in connection with the deaths of the migrants in a refrigerated truck found abandoned on Austria's main highway, law enforcement officials said Friday. Austrian police said three people had been arrested, while their Hungarian counterparts said four were in detention.
The suspects, believed to be part of a larger Bulgarian-Hungarian smuggling ring, include an Afghan and three Bulgarians, one of whom owns the truck, Hungarian national police spokesman Viktoria Csiszer-Kovacs said. Police raided houses and questioned almost 20 others in the case.
Hans Peter Doskozil, chief of police in eastern Burgenland province, said the migrants probably suffocated. At least some of the dead were Syrian, travel documents indicated, though most of the partially decomposed bodies remained unidentified. The dead included eight women and four children, the youngest a girl between 1 and 2 years old, the others boys aged 8 to 10.
The bodies were moved from a warehouse, where the abandoned truck was towed Thursday, to a Vienna morgue for autopsies. Workers in gloves and masks lifted body bags into coffins lined up on the warehouse ramp.
The disaster "should serve as a wake-up call ... for joint European action" in dealing with the migrants flocking to Europe, said Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner.
The latest deaths shows "the desperation of people seeking protection or a new life in Europe," said Melissa Fleming, spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency in Geneva.
"We believe this underscores the ruthlessness of people smugglers who have expanded their business from the Mediterranean Sea to the highways of Europe," she said. "It shows they have absolutely no regard for human life, and that they are only after profit."
Austrian state prosecutor Johann Fuchs said the perpetrators could be charged with human smuggling, danger to public safety leading to death, or murder.
At Budapest's Keleti train station, volunteers tending to migrants asked people to bring candles and flowers for a tribute there Friday in memory of the 71 victims.
The International Office of Migration has recorded 2,636 deaths linked to Mediterranean crossings this year, and more may have vanished beneath the waves out of sight of rescuers.
Two ships went down Thursday off the western Libyan city of Zuwara, where Hussein Asheini of the Red Crescent said at least 105 bodies had been recovered. About 100 people were rescued, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, with at least 100 more believed to be missing.
"A coast guard team is still diving in and checking inside to see if there's anyone else," Asheini added.
Workers pulled the dead from the water and placed them in orange-and-black body bags that were laid out on the waterfront in Zuwara, about 65 miles west of Tripoli. Several victims floated face-down in a flooded boat towed into the harbor. At least one of the dead wore a life vest.
Most of the people rescued came from Syria and sub-Saharan African countries, said Mohamed al-Misrati, the spokesman for the Red Crescent in Libya.
"You can imagine what they are going through. Some of them are still looking for their friends. We're trying to speak to them but many of them are too traumatized to even talk about the incident," he said.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that he was "horrified and heartbroken" by the latest deaths and stressed that a "large majority" of people undertaking such dangerous journeys are refugees who have the right to protection and asylum.
He called on all governments to act with compassion and said he plans a "special meeting devoted to these global concerns" on Sept. 30, during the annual General Assembly of world leaders at U.N. headquarters.
The U.N. refugee agency urged authorities to crack down on smugglers and to expand safer, legal ways for refugees to reach Europe.
Hungarian police said they arrested 21 suspected human traffickers in Budapest. They included 16 Romanians, two Syrians, two Hungarians and a Russian citizen. Police said they confiscated 16 vehicles, which had been carrying 112 people, including several Syrians, traveling along the Balkans route into the European Union.
Prosecutors in Sicily detained 10 people on suspicion of smuggling and murder Friday, alleging they crammed dozens of migrants into the airless hold of a boat where 52 bodies were found earlier this week.
Information for this article was contributed by Barry Hatton, Alison Mutler, Pablo Gorondi, Jamey Keaten, Frank Jordans, Costas Kantouris, Nicole Winfield, Dalton Bennett and George Jahn of The Associated Press.
A Section on 08/29/2015