41 reportedly dead after migrant boat capsizes off Italian island
Forty-one people have died after a migrant boat capsized in the Mediterranean last week, survivors told local Italian media on Wednesday.
Four survivors who reached the Italian island of Lampedusa told rescuers that they were on a boat carrying forty-five people, including three children, the Ansa news agency reported.
The boat initially set off on Thursday from the city of Sfax in Tunisia — a notorious hotbed for migrant smuggling — but the boat turned over and sank within a few hours of departure, Ansa reported, citing accounts from the survivors.
The survivors consisted of three men and a woman from Ivory Coast and Guinea who said they had initially been rescued by a cargo ship, before being transferred onto an Italian coast guard ship.
Questions remain regarding whether these survivor accounts are connected to two shipwrecks that occurred on Sunday, with the Italian Coast Guard saying around 30 people were missing from one wreck.
Refugees in Libya, a non-governmental organization that works to ensure the safe arrival of refugees, said in a social media post Sunday that the Italian coastguard had recovered 57 survivors and two bodies in that particular incident.
In another operation, 34 migrants were airlifted by helicopter by Italy's emergency mountain rescue service on Sunday after being stranded on a cliff in Lampedusa — located in the Sicily region in southern Italy — and geographically closer to Tunisia than it is to the Italian mainland.
Government data from Italy's Interior ministry shows that around 93,700 migrants arrived to Italy by sea this year, with the most prominent nationalities of migrants being from Guinea and the Ivory Coast.
Separately, the Tunisian Coast Guard in Sfax said on Monday that they rescued two people and recovered 11 bodies of migrants whose boat had capsized in Tunisian waters.
The boat was carrying a total of 57 people from sub-Saharan African countries and 44 other passengers were still missing, Tunisian authorities told state television on Monday.
