STANDING UP

UN: Migrant Boat Sinking 'Mass Murder'

As many as 500 drowned.

Smugglers accused of sinking a boat and drowning up to 500 migrants are likely guilty of "mass murder," said the United Nations' human rights commissioner, and they should be brought to justice. "The callous act of deliberately ramming a boat full of hundreds of defenseless people is a crime that must not go unpunished," Zeid Ra'ad Zeid al-Hussein said Friday. "If the survivors' accounts are indeed true – and they appear all too credible – we are looking at what amounts to mass murder in the Mediterranean." There were believed to be up to 100 children included in the drowned refugees from Syria, Palestinian territories, Egypt, and Sudan on their way to Italy. The smugglers are believed to be Egyptian and Palestinian.