Twenty-one migrants were missing at sea on Wednesday, according to survivors rescued from a sinking boat about 10 miles from the Italian island of Lampedusa, Italy’s Coast Guard said.
Seven men, identified as Syrian, were rescued by a Coast Guard vessel on Wednesday morning. A video showed the migrants crouching in a small white motorboat, partly submerged, before being carried in pairs by a rubber raft to a waiting Coast Guard vessel.
The migrants told their rescuers that they had left Libya on Sunday on the boat packed with 28 people, including three minors. They said that 21 people had fallen off during the crossing because of “adverse weather conditions,” the Coast Guard said in a statement.
The seven survivors were taken to Lampedusa, one of the principal destinations for migrants crossing the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe on one of the world’s deadliest migration routes.
Last year, more than 212,000 migrants and refugees tried to cross the central Mediterranean Sea from North Africa, according to a report by the United Nations refugee agency and the International Organization for Migration, or I.O.M.
At least 3,105 lost their lives or went missing at sea while attempting to cross to Europe by various Mediterranean routes, according to the report. But it noted that “the real number of dead and missing along these routes is believed to be higher as many incidents go unreported or undetected.”
Since taking power nearly two years ago, Italy’s right wing government has cracked down on illegal immigration, striking deals with Tunisia, renewing agreements with Libya, and toughening laws against traffickers.
The government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has introduced rules against rescue ships operated by nongovernmental organizations, which Italy has accused of working with human traffickers, forcing them to take migrants to far-off northern ports.
And, stoking controversy, the government is building a center in Albania where migrants will be processed and returned to their home countries if they don’t qualify for asylum.
The government strategies have had an impact, government officials believe. There has been a 62 percent decrease in arrivals to Italy in 2024 — some 40,000 through August, compared to more than 113,000 for the same period in 2023 — according to the I.O.M.
Deaths at sea, however, have not comparably declined. As of Wednesday, nearly 1,100 migrants had gone missing in the central Mediterranean in 2024, according to the I.O.M., just 25 percent fewer than the same period last year, said Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesman for the organization in Italy.
The I.O.M. statistic did not include the more than 600 people who drowned off the coast of Greece last year, which Mr. Di Giacomo described as “one of the greatest tragedies in the Mediterranean.”
Mr. Di Giacomo said that another boat had sunk on Wednesday off the eastern coast of Libya, near Tobruk. Of the 32 people on board, 22 had gone missing and one person had drowned, he said.
Chiara Cardoletti, the top official in Italy for the United Nations refugee agency, or UNHCR, posted on X that the survivors of Wednesday’s rescue near Italy had been taken in by a local agency team “and were in critical condition.”
The survivors said that the boat had flipped over because the sea was rough. Many of the survivors said that they had lost relatives on the boat, said Filippo Ungaro, a refugee agency spokesman in Italy, in an interview. “The survivors told us that the boat overturned more than once,” he said.
“Another tragic shipwreck off the coast of Lampedusa,” wrote Nicola Dell’Arciprete, the UNICEF country coordinator for Italy, on X.
The Coast Guard said they had deployed ships and an airplane to search for any possible survivors.
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