Human traffickers have apparently adopted a new method of smuggling immigrants who want to travel to another country by boat, the traffickers get hold of old and hardly seaworthy vessels, load these with the desperate migrants, and leave them to their fate by abandoning ship during the journey.

In the last month alone, at least six such "ghost ships" packed with hundreds of migrants have been abandoned by traffickers in the Mediterranean. The Italian coastguard have rescued 450 migrants already, most of them were women and children. Some of which were on board the Ezadeen, a 50-year-old cargo ship that had been designed to transport cattle.

This ship carried a flag of Sierra Leone and is a 240ft livestock carrier. It was found drifting without power about 40 nautical miles off the southern Italian coast and it had 450 people on board, several of them were pregnant women.

It seems this was revealed just 48 hours after six officials landed on the deck of another ship, the Blue Sky M - this was packed with nearly 1,000 Syrians and Kurdish migrants that had been "locked" on a crash course with the Italian coast.

These ships are loaded with their human cargo who are often cramped on the deck in bitter cold and with few supplies. The boats are directed to the Italian coastline with their engines locked and allowed to drift towards the coast.

As per reports, these migrants paid from between £3,250 to £4,500 for the trip once they had arrived in Turkey. The UN refugee agency says that last year 165,000 seaborne migrants had arrived in Italy by November 2014.