Geneva - A spokesperson for the UN migration agency said a total of 22 migrants have been killed and some 100 injured in fighting between rival smuggler gangs in Libya so far this year. The heart-wrenching numbers come at a time when seaborne migration from Africa to Italy has risen by 50 percent so far in 2017, RT reported. "This is creating all kinds of activity in the smuggling industry, and apparently that activity has reached the level of violent shootouts that left 22 killed in the last couple of days," Joel Millman, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN migration agency said. "The dead were thought to be migrants rather than smugglers because they were sub-Saharan Africans," he added. These deaths are in addition to the 140 dead bodies already found on Libyan beaches to date this year.