ROME/ ATHENS, Greece: Forty-one migrants died in a shipwreck last week in the central Mediterranean, the Ansa news agency reported on Wednesday, citing accounts from survivors who have just reached the Italian island of Lampedusa.
Ansa said four people who survived the shipwreck told rescuers that they were on a boat carrying 45 people, including three children.
The boat set off on Thursday morning from Tunisia’s Sfax, a hot spot in the migration crisis, but capsized and sank after a few hours, the survivors were quoted as saying.
The survivors — three men and a woman from Ivory Coast and Guinea — said they were rescued by a cargo ship and then transferred onto an Italian coast guard vessel.
The coast guard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It was unclear if the news given by Ansa was linked to the two shipwrecks that the coast guard had reported on Sunday, saying around 30 people were missing from them.
The coast guard had also said they had recovered 57 survivors and two bodies, amid media reports that at least one of the sunken boats had set off from Sfax on Thursday.
Separately, Tunisian authorities said on Monday that they had recovered 11 bodies from a shipwreck near Sfax on Sunday, with 44 migrants still missing from that sinking.
Italy has seen around 93,700 migrant arrivals by sea so far this year, according to interior ministry data last updated on Monday, compared to 44,700 in the same period of 2022.
Greece’s coast guard rescues 52 people from migrant sailboat anchored off remote uninhabited island
Greece’s coast guard on Tuesday rescued 52 people crammed onto a sailing boat anchored off an uninhabited island far from the country’s mainland, authorities said.
A private vessel initially spotted the sailing boat off the small island of Falconera, officials said. The island is located between Milos and the Peloponnese in an area known for strong currents and rough seas. The migrants were being taken by coast guard vessels later Tuesday to the mainland port of Lavrio, southeast of Athens.
Separately Tuesday, 19 people were rescued from a dinghy that had lost steering northeast of the eastern Aegean island of Samos. Another 18 in a different dinghy were picked up later in the day off the same island, while the coast guard said that 14 migrants were rescued Monday from a small boat off the island of Lesbos.
In June, a battered trawler smuggling up to 750 people from Libya to Italy sank southwest of Greece in one of the worst Mediterranean migrant disasters in years. Only 104 people survived, while Greek authorities were criticized for failing to intervene in time.
Greece has reported an increase in the number of people arriving in the country by sea in recent weeks. For decades, the country has been on one of the preferred migration routes into the European Union for people fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Its eastern islands close to Turkey have long been a major entry point, but stricter deterrence policies in recent years had reduced arrivals.
But Greece has come under heavy criticism over what rights organizations have said is a systematic practice of illegally and clandestinely carrying out summary deportations of recent arrivals back to Turkey without allowing them to apply for asylum. The government strenuously denies it carries out such deportations.
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