At least 26 people drowned on Wednesday after two boats carrying nearly 100 migrants capsized off the Italian island of Lampedusa, according to the Italian Coast Guard, which said search and rescue operations were still underway.
The migrants had been making the perilous journey across the central Mediterranean from Libya when the boats capsized, and 60 people were rescued at sea, said Filippo Ungaro, the Italian spokesman of UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency.
Italian news reports said that a baby and three teenagers were among the victims. It wasn’t clear how many people may still be missing.
Most of the survivors — 56 men and four women, the Italian Red Cross said — were taken to a migrant center on Lampedusa, where some told volunteers they had been traveling on two rickety boats. After one boat began to take on water, some of the migrants scrambled onto the other boat, which capsized as a result of the added weight, according to accounts told to the International Organization for Migration, another United Nations agency.
The Coast Guard said the death toll was “provisional and being updated.”
More than 32,000 migrants have died in Mediterranean waters since the migrant organization began tracking deaths at sea in 2014. So far this year, 675 migrants have died or have gone missing while making the central Mediterranean crossing to Italy and Malta, but that does not include the 26 who drowned on Wednesday, said Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesman for the migrant organization.
In past reports on deaths at sea, humanitarian agencies have noted that “the real number of dead and missing along these routes is believed to be higher as many incidents go unreported or undetected.”
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