The boat went down on Wednesday when smugglers tried to board dozens of extra passengers from smaller vessels several miles out to sea. Some people were trapped below deck with almost no chance of escape, and many women and children were among the dead, survivors said.

“The boat is meant to hold 200, and they put 400 in it. And this is what caused the catastrophe,” Ahmed Darwish, an Egyptian survivor, told the Associated Press from a hospital bed. “[Those who] knew how to swim moved away, leaving behind women and small children.”

The boat went down a few miles off the coast of northern Beheira province, near the port of Rosetta. Authorities are uncertain how many people were on board.

The provincial governor, Mohammed Sultan, said that there were probably between 250 and 400 passengers, the Associated Press reported, but Egypt’s state-run news agency, MENA, put the total at about 600.

Investigations are likely to focus on a cold storage room used to hold fish, where many victims may have been trapped. “The death toll is going to rise,” a medical source told Agence France-Presse. “[The storage area] hasn’t been opened and there must be a lot of people inside.”

A Sudanese survivor named Sumaya, who had hoped to join her husband in Europe, said dozens of passengers had probably gone down with the boat. “There were many in the boat’s hold who died. The boat keeled over and they were locked in. By God, at least 100 people.”

Smugglers frequently take migrants out to sea in small crafts that can slip out from the coast without drawing attention, then board hundreds of people on to larger vessels for the long journey to Italy.

Survivors and relatives blamed traffickers for overloading the boat but also accused authorities of reacting slowly to the pre-dawn disaster.

Most of those who survived were picked up by fishermen, not official services, even though the boat was so close to land that those on board could make SOS calls from their mobile phones.

“I immediately called the coastguard, but they didn’t move at all. The fishing boats saved them,” said Gamal Assad, an Egyptian who was woken around 5am by a panicked phone call from his 17-year-old brother, Bassem.

The head of the local council, Ali Abdel-Sattar, told AP that the loss of life would have been much heavier had a fishing vessel not been close by when the boat capsized. “If this man [skipper Mohammed Abu Hamid] wasn’t there, if this man wasn’t sent by God, the entire group of migrants would have been dead by now,” he said. He said locals paid up to $4,000 to risk their lives in hope of a new start in Europe.

Many of the survivors of the latest incident have been detained by police. Some of those rescued who suffered injuries were taken to hospitals, where they lie handcuffed to hospital beds under police guard, potentially facing charges. They are mostly Egyptians, but also include Syrians, Sudanese and people from several other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the governor said.

Although the stream of people risking the crossing from Turkey to Greece has been slowed by a deal with the EU, which would see many returned, there are still hundreds of thousands of people willing to gamble their lives on a chance to reach Europe.

Over 300,000 have made the crossing this year, UN figures show, and thousands have lost their lives. One of the main routes is from Libya to Italy, but as it has grown more lawless, departures from Egypt have risen.

Mutwali Mohamed, a 28-year-old welder who survived the wreck but lost his family, told AFP that they were fleeing poverty. “I risked my life and the lives of my son and wife so they could have a nice life,” he said, weeping. “I wish I hadn’t survived.”

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