Seven Syrian men have been rescued and 21 people are missing at sea after a migrant boat capsized in the central Mediterranean, Italian authorities said on Wednesday.
The coast guard said the survivors were pulled from a semi-sunken vessel near Lampedusa. They told rescuers they had set off from Libya days earlier with 28 people aboard, including three children, and that 21 of them fell into the sea in rough weather.
Chiara Cardoletti, who heads the UN refugee agency in Italy, said the survivors were in critical condition and that many had lost relatives. The boat is believed to have departed from the port of Sabratha, west of Tripoli, and UNHCR said Sudanese nationals were also among those on board.
Notably, the toll is not an outlier. The central Mediterranean ranks among the world’s most lethal migration routes; the UN migration agency counts more than 2,500 people dead or missing on the crossing last year, and 1,047 so far this year. Naval and air units were still searching for the missing.
The salient point, for all the attention these crossings draw, is that the numbers keep repeating: overloaded boats, rough weather, and a count of the missing that begins as an estimate and ends as a total.
Sources
- About 20 migrants reported missing after boat capsizes off Italy | The Peninsula Qatar
- 7 rescued, 21 missing after migrant shipwreck off Italy's Lampedusa
