AT least 26 people are dead and a dozen missing after a packed migrant boat capsized off Italy’s Lampedusa island.
Sixty survivors were pulled from the water and taken to a Lampedusa reception centre, with four rushed to hospital, according to the Italian Red Cross and UN agencies.
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The disaster struck early Wednesday when an Italian law enforcement aircraft spotted the overturned vessel and bodies in the water around 14 miles from Lampedusa.
Nearly 100 migrants were aboard the boat when it capsized.
Rescue crews are still scouring the waters with five ships, two aircraft and a helicopter in a race against time to find the missing.
Officials warn the death toll – currently at 26 – is expected to rise as hopes fade for those unaccounted for.
The coastguard said the death toll remains “provisional and being updated.”
Survivor accounts suggest between 92 and 97 people were on board when the boat departed Libya.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said the group originally set off on two vessels from the Tripoli area.
When one began taking on water, all passengers were crammed into a fibreglass boat which later capsized in international waters due to overloading.
“It is not immediately known how long the migrants had been at sea,” Lampedusa mayor Filippo Mannino said, adding the tragedy happened “presumably at dawn.”
Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, who has made tackling illegal immigration a key priority, vowed to keep fighting “unscrupulous traffickers” by “preventing irregular departures” and “managing migration flows.”
She said: “When a tragedy like this occurs, with the deaths of dozens of people in the waters of the Mediterranean, a strong sense of dismay and compassion arises in all of us.
“That today’s tragedy occurred despite a ready and operational international response warns us that the necessary rescue effort is not sufficient and, above all, does not address the root causes of this tragic problem.”
So far this year, 675 migrants have died making the perilous central Mediterranean crossing — not including the latest sinking.
In the past decade, almost 24,500 people have died or gone missing on the route, the IOM says.
The sinking is the latest in a string of deadly tragedies on the central Mediterranean route, one of the world’s most perilous migration corridors.
Most boats depart from Libya or Tunisia, often crammed far beyond capacity and with little chance of surviving rough seas.
The deadliest shipwreck off Lampedusa happened on October 3 2013, when a boat carrying over 500 migrants from Eritrea, Somalia and Ghana caught fire and capsized, killing at least 368 people.
The tragedy prompted international calls for action to address the crisis.
The latest sinking comes a day after UK government figures showed more than 50,000 migrants have crossed the Channel from France since Sir Keir Starmer became prime minister.
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