Migrant shipwreck sees 41 feared dead off Italy's Lampedusa Island

A shipwreck off Italy's Lampedusa island has seen at least 41 migrants feared dead, several media outlets have reported.

Citing accounts of survivors, the news agency ANSA informed media these migrants were on a boat which had set off from Sfax in Tunisia and was headed towards the coast of Italy when stormy conditions caused it to sink.

Four survivors - three men and a woman, asylum seekers from the Ivory Coast and Guinea - were rescued by a Maltese cargo ship, then transferred to an Italian coast guard vessel.

The survivors said the precarious metal boat carrying 45 passengers, including three children, began to take on water as soon as they reached the open sea.

One asylum seeker recounted the events to the coastguard: “Suddenly we were overwhelmed by a giant wave."

According to the four testimonies, almost all the passengers, who are believed to be from sub-Saharan Africa, ended up in the open, stormy sea for hours. At least 41 passengers are believed to have drowned.

Neither of the rescue vessels came across any of the victims’ bodies.

A seperate sinking saw the bodies of a woman and toddler recovered by the Italian coastguard after two shipwrecks overnight off Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost point.

The coast guard had also recovered approximately 57 survivors and two bodies, amid media reports that at least one of the sunken boats had set off from Sfax last Thursday.

Separately, on Monday, authorities in Tunisia said that they had recovered 11 bodies from a shipwreck near Sfax on Sunday, with 44 migrants still missing from that sinking.

Surveillance planes belonging to the charity rescue group, The Sea-Watch, spotted the four survivors from one of these shipwrecks people being rescued by a cargo ship. The charity workers said: “They (the four survivors) were among the few aboard (the sunken boat) with a life jacket, and (after the shipwreck) they remained in the water until they found another empty boat.”

Rescuers have commented that 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.

Italy has seen approximately 93,700 migrant arrivals by sea in 2023, so far, according to interior ministry data last updated on Monday, compared to 44,700 in the same period of 2022.