Rome: Up to 40 migrants who were seeking to reach Europe are feared dead after their rubber dinghy capsized off the coast of chaos-wracked Libya, according to survivors interviewed by the UN refugee agency Thursday.

"My colleagues are interviewing the survivors... who arrived this afternoon in Augusta (Sicily), and they are talking about 35 to 40 people missing at sea," UNHCR`s spokesman in Italy, Federico Fossi, told AFP of the accident on Wednesday.