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, according to media reports.
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 were on a vessel that had set off from Sfax, in Tunisia, and sank on its way to Italy’s shores.
The asylum seekers, three men and a woman from Ivory Coast and Guinea, said their vessel, a metal boat carrying 45 passengers, including three children, 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.
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Almost all the passengers, who are believed to be from sub-Saharan Africa, ended up in the open, stormy sea for hours. According to the testimonies of the four, at least 41 passengers are believed to have drowned.
Neither the Maltese bulk carrier nor the Italian coastguard boat came across any of the victims’ bodies.
[ Two people dead and 57 rescued from shipwrecks off Italy’s LampedusaOpens in new window ]
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 life jacket, and (after the shipwreck) they remained in the water until they found another empty boat.”
According to rescuers, the survivors were exhausted and in a state of shock. They are presumed to have spent several days adrift at sea with no food or drinking water.
Investigators noticed that their metal boat was without 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.
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 four men would identify boats carrying asylum seekers to Europe 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 valuable engine.
One person rescued a few weeks ago described an attack, saying: “They cut us off course, as if they wanted to ram us. Then they boarded us. They were armed with knives and threatened us that if we didn’t give them the engine they would hurt us. We had no choice.”
Police found at least three allegedly stolen engines on the boat used by the four Tunisians, as well as hundreds of euros and dozens of mobile phones allegedly belonging to the migrants.
Investigators are trying to determine whether they were operating on their own or acting on behalf of human traffickers.
“Why did they steal these engines?” said Salvatore Vella, the head prosecutor in Agrigento, Sicily, who led the investigation. “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.’’
Other people who have attempted to make the crossing have also claimed that Tunisian coastguards removed their vessel’s engine, then beat them and abandoned them at sea, in order to stop them from leaving.
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.
Citing accounts from survivors, Italian media reported that the two boats had departed from Sfax and had sunk in rough seas. The first vessel had 48 people onboard, of whom 43 were rescued. The second boat had been carrying 42 passengers, of whom 14 were rescued.
There has been a big rise in the number of people attempting the crossing from north Africa to Italy this year.
According to Italian 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 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 of 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 they said had been left in the desert by Tunisian authorities without water, food or shelter, with many left to die in the extreme heat.
The sea route to Italy is the world’s most lethal and is described by NGOs as a “liquid graveyard’'.
According to data from the International Organisation for Migration, 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. - Guardian