At least 94 people died and 250 are missing after a boat packed with African migrants sank off the southern Italian island of Lampedusa.
Bodies taken from the water were laid out along the quayside as the death toll rose.
It is one of the worst disasters to hit the perilous route for migrants seeking to reach Europe from Africa.
"It's horrific, like a cemetery, they are still bringing them out," Lampedusa Mayor Giusi Nicolini told reporters.
The coastguard said 151 survivors had been rescued after the 20-metre boat caught fire and sank about half a mile off the island.
The UN refugee agency UNHCR said around 500 passengers, all Eritreans, had boarded the boat in Libya.
The disaster came four days ago after 13 migrants drowned off eastern Sicily.
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said action was needed by the European Union to stem "a succession of massacres of innocent people".
Last year, almost 500 people were reported dead or missing making the crossing from Tunisia to Italy, the UNHCR said.
Numbers have been boosted by thousands of refugees from the civil war in Syria.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said: "I commend the swift action taken by the Italian coast guard to save lives.
"At the same time, I am dismayed at the rising global phenomenon of migrants and people fleeing conflict or persecution and perishing at sea."
Migrants frequently land on Lampedusa, just 70 miles from the coast of Tunisia, often picked up at sea in dangerously overcrowded boats by the Italian coast guard.
Pope Francis, who visited the island in July on his first papal trip outside Rome, said he felt "great pain" for the "many victims of the latest tragic shipwreck today off Lampedusa".
Transport Minister Maurizio Lupi said more needed to be done to combat people traffickers who coordinate the transport of migrants in crowded and unsafe vessels.
"It is a task which we have to take on and which the international community and the European community have to take on as well," he said.
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