The disaster happened in waters between Italy and Libya, based on accounts from 41 survivors who were rescued on April 16 by a merchant ship, UNHCR said.
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Migrants sit in a rubber dinghy during a rescue operation by SOS Mediterranee ship Aquarius off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa.
If true, the toll would make the incident one of the worst tragedies involving refugees and migrants over the past year.
The survivors told rescuers with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees that they were part of a group of 100 to 200 people who departed last week from the port city of Tobruk in Libya on a 30-meter-long boat.
The 41 survivors include people who had not yet boarded the larger vessel and some who managed to swim back to the smaller boat.
An Ethiopian man named Mohamed told the International Organization for Migration (IOM) that his wife, two-month-old child and brother-in-law had died in the sinking.
Up to 500 people are now believed to have died after four migrant boats capsized in the Mediterranean. “After the shipwreck we were drifted at sea for a few days, without food, without anything”, the IOM quoted him as saying.
“In the middle of sea, the smugglers brought in more passengers, transferring them with a smaller boat”. “This is another example of what is happening nearly in a daily basis in the Mediterranean”. The second boat could not take the weight of numbers and, the survivors said, sank due to overcrowding while it was being loaded with more people.
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More than 1 million migrants and refugees crossed the Mediterranean a year ago – mostly refugees from war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria fleeing to Greece, and the European Union, via Turkey.
