Images released by the coastguard show the men in a tiny boat, completely filled with water, sliding on inflatable mattresses towards the rescue vessel.
At least 20 migrants are missing after a boat capsized in the Mediterranean near the Italian island of Lampedusa, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Italian coastguard said on Wednesday.
“Twenty people are missing in the Mediterranean after a shipwreck on September 1, according to survivors,” wrote Chiara Cardoletti of UNHCR on X. “The seven survivors, welcomed by our team in Lampedusa, are in critical condition. Many of them are believed to have lost relatives” in the disaster, she said.
The Italian coastguard, for its part, reported 21 missing persons. They indicated that they had rescued in the morning, less than 20 km from Lampedusa, “a boat adrift, half submerged by water and on the verge of sinking, with seven migrants on board, all men of Syrian nationality”.
The research continues
Images released by the coastguard show the men in a tiny boat, completely filled with water, sliding on inflatable mattresses towards the rescue vessel.
“The rescued migrants said they left Libya on September 1 with 28 people on board, including three minors, of whom 21 are believed to have fallen into the water due to bad weather conditions,” they said in a statement.
The latter also indicated that they are continuing the search for missing persons, including with the help of an aircraft.
In 2023, more than three thousand migrants were reported missing after attempting to cross the Mediterranean, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
According to figures from the Italian Interior Ministry, arrivals by sea have fallen considerably since the beginning of the year: 43,061 people arrived in Italy between January 1 and September 4, compared to 115,177 in the same period in 2023.
Immobilized for 20 days
Since far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s coalition came to power in October 2022, NGO ships operating in the Mediterranean are theoretically only allowed to carry out one rescue at a time and must go “without delay” to a port immediately afterwards – a policy that prevents them from carrying out several in a row.
NGOs believe this violates maritime law, which requires any vessel to come to the aid of a boat in distress.
Rome accuses the rescue ships of being a “pull factor”, even though in reality the vast majority of migrants arriving in Italy are picked up by the coastguard.
Italian authorities decided on Wednesday to immobilize the ship of the humanitarian NGO Sea-Watch for 20 days on the grounds that it did not wait for the green light from the Libyan authorities to rescue migrants.
The Sea-Watch 5 ship arrived in the Italian port of Civitavecchia on Wednesday with 289 rescued people on board, but will now have to wait 20 days before it can set off on another mission in the Mediterranean.
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