ROME: One woman died, two people were feared missing, and 87 were rescued following a migrant shipwreck off the Italian island of Lampedusa, a UN migration agency official said on Monday.
Lampedusa lies between Tunisia, Malta and the larger Italian island of Sicily and is the first port of call for many migrants seeking to reach the EU from North Africa, in what has become one of the world’s deadliest sea crossings.
The migrants, initially rescued by a Tunisian fishing boat and then picked up by the Italian coastguard, arrived in Lampedusa at around 4am, International Organisation for Migration (IOM) spokesperson Flavio Di Giacomo said.
They had set off from Tunisia on a flimsy metal boat that disintegrated during navigation, he said, describing such vessels as “floating coffins”. “We are trying to see if, apart from the body that was recovered, one or two people are missing. Probably there are two,” he added.
Another group of around 80 sea migrants, including children and two or three pregnant women, also landed in Lampedusa overnight after a “dramatic” crossing in very rough weather, Di Giacomo said.
“They were lucky to make it, given the sea conditions they faced”, he said, indicating that the group had left Libya on Friday on a rubber dinghy.
More than 25,000 migrants have died or gone missing on the central Mediterranean route between North Africa and Italy since 2014, according to the IOM, including 1,810 last year and 542 in the year to date.
