Prime Minister Joseph Muscat is set to meet his Italian counterpart Matteo Renzi before an EU Foreign Ministers meeting on  Monday morning to discuss and map out a way to tackle the escalating problem of migrant deaths at sea.

The meeting comes as a search and rescue operation some 120 kilometres off the Libyan coast continues, though it is now rapidly turning into a corpse recovery operation.

Hundreds of migrants are thought to have perished in the disaster and it is understood that some of the recovered bodies are to be brought to Malta.