MILAN — Ten people were found dead in an overcrowded boat carrying migrants off the coast of Libya, and were believed to have suffocated, the Doctors Without Borders charity has said.

It said the bodies were found dead at the bottom of the wooden boat and 99 surviving migrants and refugees were rescued off Libya.

The Geo Barents, a rescue ship operated by the charity, responded after volunteers conducting aerial surveillance confirmed a distress call coming from about 30 kilometers off the Libyan coast.

"At the bottom of the overcrowded wooden boat, 10 people were found dead," tweeted the charity, known by its French initials MSF.

It described them as "10 avoidable deaths... 10 persons who died from suffocation, after 13 hours adrift at sea. The deadly central #Med route. How can we accept this in 2021?"

More than 59,000 asylum-seekers have reached Italian shores so far this year, 50% more than last year but far from the numbers who risked their lives on rickety smugglers’ boats during 2014-2017.

The route is deadly -- 1,236 people have died in the central Mediterranean so far this year, compared with 858 in the same period of 2020, according to Flavio Di Giacomo of the UN's Migration Agency, the IOM.

He tweeted that the Geo Barents rescue "probably avoided other victims", saying it showed "the need to increase patrols at sea".

MSF said there were currently 186 people on board Geo Barents, including women and children, the youngest of whom is 10 months old.

"Many of them seem traumatized by the horrendous ordeal," it said, calling for a safe port to disembark them. — Agencies