ROME — A migrant ship carrying about 110 people capsized in the frigid waters off Libya on Saturday and only four survivors had been rescued after hours of searching, aid groups said.

Eight bodies were recovered but poor conditions were hampering the search, which was taking place 30 miles off Libya’s coast, Italy’s ANSA news agency reported.

Flavio di Giacomo, Rome spokesman for the International Organization of Migration, said four people had been rescued. He said more details would become available after the four are brought to shore.

The search is being coordinated by the Italian coast guard, with assistance from a French naval ship, two merchant vessels, and planes.

The nationalities of the migrants were not immediately available.

The vast majority of migrant ships set off from Libya’s lawless coasts, where smugglers operate with impunity charging desperate migrants hundreds of dollars apiece to make the dangerous Mediterranean crossing.

Last year saw a record high number — 181,000 people — heading to Italy by sea, the EU rescue operation Frontex reported. West Africans, most of them hailing from Nigeria, accounted for most of the migrants in 2016, with a tenfoldincrease in their numbers since 2010, Frontex reported.

On Friday, the Italian coast guard rescued about 550 migrants traveling across the Mediterranean.

Doctors Without Borders, which helped with that rescue, said it found more than 100 people on a single inflatable dinghy.

In a separate development Saturday, a German lawmaker who has long been critical of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policies on immigration says she is leaving the leader’s conservative party.

Erika Steinbach, 73, has been a lawmaker for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union since 1990. But the conservative hard-liner has increasingly been at odds with the chancellor, who has steered her party toward the center.

Steinbach has criticized the most recent Greek bailout and Merkel’s welcoming approach to migrants in 2015.

Germany saw 890,000 asylum-seekers arrive in 2015 and 280,000 last year.

Steinbach said that allowing people into Germany for months without identifying them properly went ‘‘against our laws and against EU treaties.’’