At least 41 people are feared to have died after a boat sank in rough seas off the Italian island of Lampedusa in the central Mediterranean, Italian authorities and the UN said on Wednesday.
Four survivors who were rescued on Wednesday morning by a Maltese bulk carrier and eventually moved to a patrol boat from the Italian coastguard, said they had been on a vessel that set off from the Tunisian port of Sfax six days ago and sank on its way to Italy’s shores.
The asylum seekers, a 13-year-old boy, a woman and two men from Ivory Coast and Guinea, said the precarious metal boat carrying 45 passengers had begun to take on water as soon as they reached the open sea.
“Suddenly we were overwhelmed by a giant wave,” one survivor told the coastguard.
Almost all the passengers, who are believed to be from sub-Saharan Africa and included three children, ended up in the open, stormy sea for hours. According to the testimonies of the four survivors, at least 41 passengers are believed to have drowned.
Neither the Maltese bulk carrier nor the Italian coastguard boat has found any of the victims’ bodies.
The Sea-Watch charity rescue group, whose surveillance plane spotted the people being rescued by a cargo ship, said: “They were among the few aboard [the sunken boat] with a lifejacket, and [after the shipwreck] they remained in the water until they found another empty boat.”
According to rescuers, the survivors are exhausted and in a state of shock. They are presumed to have spent several days adrift at sea with no food or drinking water.
The UN said migrants who had set off from Tunisia in recent days faced “prohibitive weather and sea conditions”, making their journeys on unseaworthy iron boats “disproportionally dangerous”.
“In the past few days there have been six-metre high waves in the central Mediterranean”, said Salvatore Vella, the head prosecutor in Agrigento, Sicily, who has opened an investigation. “It is a crime for human traffickers to launch these vessels in this weather. Try to imagine the hell they went through.”
Investigators noticed that the metal boat did not have an engine, like half of the boats recently used by people departing from Tunisia to reach Europe, and which were rescued by the Italian coastguard.
There has been a large rise in the number of people attempting the crossing from north Africa to Italy this year, and the UN has reiterated a call for governments to dedicate more resources to Mediterranean search and rescue missions – for which there is little appetite in EU capitals.
According to interior ministry figures, more than 78,000 people have landed in Italy after crossing by boat from north Africa since the start of the year – more than double the arrivals during the same period in 2022.
The vast majority, 42,719, had set off from Tunisia, which has surpassed Libya as the principal departure hub for migrants, and where the EU last month signed a €1bn (£860m) deal to help stem irregular migration.
The Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, whose far-right government has imposed tough restrictive measures against NGO rescue ships, was a key protagonist in the deal.
Recently, Tunisia has been accused of removing hundreds of sub-Saharan African migrants to a desolate area along the border with Libya.
Libyan border guards and aid workers said they had rescued dozens of migrants who had been left in the desert by Tunisian authorities without water, food or shelter.
Last week, police in Italy arrested four Tunisians on charges of piracy, accusing them of intercepting boats in the central Mediterranean and stealing their engines, leaving the vessels adrift.
Investigators said the men would identify boats carrying asylum seekers and, with the help of other vessels, blockade them in international waters off the Tunisian coast, before boarding them to rob the passengers of money and phones and the boat of its engine.
Investigators are trying to determine whether they were operating on their own or on behalf of human traffickers.
“Why did they steal these engines?” said Vella. “It is possible that they then tried to resell them. But we cannot exclude [the possibility that] that these men could also work for human traffickers in the Sfax region of Tunisia, from where most asylum seekers depart to reach Europe.’’
On Sunday, in a separate sinking, the bodies of a woman and toddler were recovered by the Italian coastguard after two shipwrecks overnight off Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost point. Fifty-seven people were rescued and more than 30 were believed to be missing.
The sea route to Italy is the world’s most lethal and is described by NGOs as a “liquid graveyard’’. According to IOM data, more than 2,000 people have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean so far in 2023.
Since 2014, almost 28,000 asylum seekers have gone missing.
Reuters contributed to this report.
