migrants

The coast guard said Monday it had rescued 2,492 people in 70 operations off the eastern islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Agathonissi, Farmakonissi, Kos and Symi from Friday morning until Monday morning.

The coast guard also rescued another 13 people in the water near Chios. One person was unconscious and hospitalized.

A national police statement said the Bulgarian national was arrested on Saturday evening. Police said Sunday they will seek to have him held in custody on suspicion of human trafficking.

On Saturday, a court in the central city of Kecskemet — from where prosecutors say the truck departed — placed four other suspects under preliminary arrest pending possible indictment.

Francis on Sunday invited faithful in St. Peter's Square in Rome to pray silently with him for migrants who die "on their terrible journeys." He also prayed that God would "help us to cooperate effectively to impede these crimes, which offend the entire human family." Francis noted Vienna's cardinal was in the square.

Four men are being investigated by Hungarian authorities in the human trafficking case.

Prosecutors in Kecskemet said they would request the preliminary arrest of the three Bulgarians and an Afghan at a closed-doors hearing Saturday in the central Hungarian city.

The truck with 71 dead migrants was found Thursday in the safety lane of the main Budapest-to-Vienna highway. The suspects were detained in Hungary later that day.

An estimated 200 people are missing and feared dead; the bodies of 82 people washed ashore on Friday local time.

In one boat, many appeared to have been trapped in the hold when it sank.

The boats left separately on Thursday from the western Libyan town of Zuwara, a major launchpad for smugglers shipping migrants to Italy.

The migrants were from sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, Syria, Morocco and Bangladesh, an security official said.

Police spokeswoman Viktoria Csiszer-Kovacs says Friday the four detained Thursday in Hungary include three Bulgarian citizens and one person from Afghanistan. One of the Bulgarians is the owner of the truck. Nearly 20 other people were questioned as witnesses and houses connected to the case were also searched.

Police official Hans Peter Doskozil said the truck, with Hungarian license plates, was found on the shoulder of the highway. He suggested the victims had been dead for some time, telling state broadcaster ORF that the bodies appeared partially decomposed.

He said the truck was apparently abandoned Wednesday and its back door was left open, exposing the bodies to police.

The Swedish ship Poseidon was already rescuing 130 migrants from a raft north of Libya's coast when it got a call to assist a nearby wooden ship, authorities said. The Swedes rescued 439 survivors from the wooden boat then looked for the bodies.

"We had to cut up the deck of the wooden boat to get to (the bodies) in a safe way," Swedish coast guard spokesman Mattias Lindholm told The Associated Press.

 Then they jostled to formally enter the country so they could quickly leave it, heading toward more prosperous European Union nations on a desperate quest to escape war and poverty.

In Roszke, a Hungarian border town, migrants mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan requesting asylum were being processed by authorities. Police used tear gas to break up a brief scuffle involving about 200 migrants, saying the migrants were growing impatient with delays in the registration process caused by the growing number of arrivals.