At Least 26 Migrants Drown Off the Italian Island of Lampedusa
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.'
More than 38,200 migrants have managed to make the crossing to Italian shores so far in 2025, according to Italy's interior ministry.
The boats that sank on Wednesday went down 14 nautical miles from the coast of Lampedusa, officials said. They said that the vessels left Zawiya, west of Tripoli, early Wednesday and that the causes of the shipwreck were still unknown.
Vessels, helicopters and planes from the Italian Coast Guard, Italy's financial police and Frontex, the European Union's border agency, were involved in the rescue operations, the Coast Guard said.
The Italian branch of Sea-Watch, the German nongovernmental organization that operates rescue boats for migrants in the Mediterranean, expressed 'rage and frustration' on X after what it described as the 'umpteenth shipwreck.' It added that civil rescue ships could have helped immediately had they been alerted.
Mr. Ungaro, of the UNHCR, said search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean should be reinforced, and called on Europe to better support Italy and its coast guard. He also urged Europe to open humanitarian corridors for migrants, in particular those escaping from wars and countries where their rights have been violated.
Italy's prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, expressed 'deep sorrow' over the fate of the victims and assailed human traffickers that profit from these journeys. She said the government was committed to fighting traffickers 'in the only way possible: by preventing irregular departures and managing migration flows.' Sea rescues were not enough, she added.
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