Refugees on the deck of the M/V Ezadeen, whose human trafficking crew abandoned their human cargo to the chances of the sea.

A ship carrying hundreds of migrants has been abandoned by its crew in rough seas in the Mediterranean off Italy's south coast in the second such incident in three days, the Italian coastguard said on Friday.

Coastguards managed to take control of the vessel, the Sierra Leone-flagged Ezadeen, after landing on it by helicopter, a statement said. Facing difficult weather conditions, they are trying to take the vessel to an Italian port.

The cargo ship had been drifting powerless after running out of fuel about 40 miles from Italy's southern coast with as many as 450 people onboard. The ship was built almost 50 years ago to carry livestock, a Website tracking maritime movements said.

"We know that it left from a Turkish port and was abandoned by its crew," coastguard spokesman Filippo Marinitold SkyTG24 television.

"When we hailed the ship to ask about its status, a migrant woman responded, saying, 'We are alone and we have no one to help us.'"

It had been put on a collision course for the Italian coast before running out of fuel, he said.

The nationality of the migrants was not yet known, a coastguard spokesman said, but there are women and children on board. It is the third such migrant ship in the past two weeks as smugglers turn to abandoning old ships in a shift in tactics.

On Wednesday, about 800 migrants, mostly Syrian refugees, arrived in Italy after they were apparently abandoned by their ship's crew and set on a crash course for the Italian coast. The coastguard also boarded that vessel and took over navigation.

Two weeks ago, the Italian navy went to the aid of an abandoned cargo ship carrying 850 migrants, leaving them at a port in Sicily.

Civil war in Syria and anarchy in Libya swelled the number of people crossing the Mediterranean last year. Many of them paid smugglers $1,000-$2,000 to travel.

The United Nations refugee agency says 160,000 seaborne migrants arrived in Italy by November 2014 and a further 40,000 in Greece. Thousands more have died attempting the journey.

Smugglers have changed tactics because Italy has ended its Mare Nostrum maritime search and rescue mission, which makes a crossing in a small boat more risky, and due to increased fighting in Libya, Carlotta Sami, a spokeswoman for the UN refugee agency, told Reuters.

"We have seen increasing use of old cargo ships ready to be dismantled (to smuggle migrants) over the past two months," she said. "The usually don't even have any electronic equipment on board."

The cargo ships are usually carrying mostly Syrian refugees, she said, but also others, including some fleeing fighting in Iraq.

Smugglers set autopilot course in international waters and jump onto a smaller vessel to escape, she said.

Italy discontinued Mare Nostrum partly due to public concern over the 114-million-euro ($137 million) bill the mission racked up in its first year. Human rights groups warned that closing the mission would endanger more lives.

Almost 1,000 migrants arrived in Italy on a cargo ship on Wednesday after apparently being abandoned by its crew in the Adriatic Sea, the Italian Red Cross said.

The mainly Syrian migrants were bundled off the Blue Sky M when it arrived in Italy in the early hours of the morning after it was first spotted near the coast of Corfu.

Greece sent its navy and coastguard with a military helicopter to the scene on Tuesday in response to an alarm call about a possible incident on the Moldovan-flagged ship.

Italian officials were airlifted onto the Blue Sky M after it left Greek waters to check it could navigate safely. The coastguard said there were 970 people on board when the ship arrived at the small port city of Gallipoli.

Emergency workers hurried the migrants out of the freezing cold into a hospital tent and onto coaches when they arrived. After an erroneous Red Cross report of four deaths earlier, officials said no one was known to have died.

Greek state television reported on Tuesday that the alarm had been raised because armed men were on board, but the defense and shipping ministries did not confirm this.

The Red Cross said the ship, which reportedly set off from Turkey, had apparently been abandoned in the Strait of Otranto that separates Italy from Albania.

"The ship was abandoned by its crew in open water," Red Cross spokeswoman Mimma Antonagi said. "If (Italian officers) had not gone on board, it would have crashed into the coast."

Local prosecutors have impounded the Blue Sky M as part of an investigation into the incident and arrested a Moldovan man who arrived on the ship and was identified by the migrants as one of the people smugglers arranging their passage, a judicial source said.

Civil war in Syria and anarchy in Libya have swelled the number of people crossing the Mediterranean in rickety boats this year. Many of them paid smugglers $1,000-$2,000 to travel.

The United Nations refugee agency says 160,000 seaborne migrants arrived in Italy by November 2014 and a further 40,000 in Greece. Thousands more have died attempting the journey.

Italy is due to close its Mare Nostrum maritime search and rescue mission definitively at the end of December, partly due to popular concern over the 114 million euro ($138.25 million) bill the mission racked up in its first year.

Human rights groups have warned that closing Mare Nostrum would endanger more lives in the Mediterranean. ($1 = 0.8246 euros)  

On 10 December 2014, on Human Rights Day, upon the kind invitation of Mr Antonio Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, I attended the High Commissioner's Dialogue on Protection Challenges with the theme of "Protection at Sea" held at the Palais des Nations, Geneva. I participated in the high level panel discussion "Boat People in the twenty-first century", together with Ambassador William Swing, Director General, International Organization for Migration and Mr Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Before the opening of the event today, I met Ambassador Swing and we exchanged views on collaboration between our two Organizations. This year marks the 40-year anniversary of our formal agreement of cooperation and we agreed to strengthen our cooperation through the review of the Agreement of Cooperation between the two Organizations.

At the high-level panel, I stated that IMO and the shipping industry are determined to continue the established practice to render assistance to persons in distress at sea, including migrants and refugees, but we should ease the burden of seafarers and merchant ships. Prompt and predictable disembarkation arrangements should be further pursued and I pledged to encourage IMO Member Governments to work further with a view to establishing a Regional MOU to ensure that objective.

The current practice of putting large numbers of people into unseaworthy boats in the shipping routes and creating distress situations thus obliging merchant ships to render assistance is an abuse of the traditional humanitarian activity firmly established in the maritime world. The operators of these boats have the clear intention to misuse the presence of navy vessels, coast guard patrol boats and merchant ships.  Clearly, the smugglers have no regard for the safety of human life.  

I stated that we need to consider what actions could be taken in order to prevent these unsafe sea passages from happening in the first place; and that we should consider alternative ways of achieving the safe, lawful and regulated passage of migrants, rather than only relying on established search and rescue procedures to rescue needlessly endangered persons. I assured the panel that search and rescue activities will be continued, in any event, with the determination of the shipping community.

In the field of the prevention of unsafe sea passages of hundreds of migrants on board small boats, I have been raising the need for concerted action to address migrant smuggling. Migrants do not possess boats and somebody must have arranged the boats, the fuel and the boats' operators and then set sail with hundreds of migrants, against all safety regulations.  Action must be taken to prevent this organized crime in the first place.  

IMO Member States and the shipping industry need to work in partnership with other relevant and interested entities, within our respective organizations' competences, with a view to mobilizing the international community to take appropriate action to develop and implement appropriate measures to address migrant smugglers and all those criminals who take advantage of the desperation of refugees and migrants and place people at grave risk to their lives. There is a vital need for sharing information in order to establish a sufficient knowledge base from which UN agencies and other stakeholders can address the problem, for example through establishing a database on known smugglers and boats used for the unsafe and unregulated passage of migrants over the sea.

In the field of considering alternative mode of sea passages, I am proposing to start dialogues among relevant Governments with a view to strengthening the current cooperation among maritime Administrations, coast guards, navies and immigration offices.

I am now planning to invite UN Agencies and organisations to meet at IMO and discuss the practicalities of improving the situation.  The international effort to mobilise resources to counter piracy shows the ability of Governments to react when they wish to address maritime challenges. This is one such challenge.  

Koji

Editors Note:  Merchant Seafarers are often the first responders to migrants or refugees in peril at sea. This video shows actual footage of a US ship rescuing Vietnamese refugees escaping their homeland in 1976. A US Mariner onboard the ship filmed the rescue, and recently, the Vu family discovered it and watched their rescue, and relived it.