New Delhi: In a tragic incident, forty-one migrants reportedly died in a shipwreck last week off the Italian island of Lampedusa, Reuters reported citing the Ansa news agency on Wednesday.
According to Ansa, a group of four people who survived the shipwreck told rescuers that they were on a boat carrying 45 people, including three children.
According to the survivors, originally from the Ivory Coast and Guinea, the boat set off on Thursday morning from Tunisia's Sfax but capsized and sank after a few hours, reported Reuters.
They added that they were rescued by a cargo ship and then transferred onto an Italian coast guard vessel.
The Italian coast guard on Sunday reported two shipwrecks in the area, but it is not clear whether this vessel is one of those.
The coast guard had said that around 30 people were missing from them and that they had recovered 57 survivors and two bodies.
Separately, Tunisian authorities said on Monday that they had recovered 11 bodies from a shipwreck near Sfax on Sunday, with 44 migrants still missing from that sinking.
Italy has seen around 93,700 migrant arrivals by sea so far this year, according to interior ministry data last updated on Monday, compared to 44,700 in the same period of 2022.
Similarly, there has been a surge in migration across the Mediterranean from Tunisia this year after a crackdown by Tunis on migrants from sub-Saharan Africa living in the country illegally and reports of racist attacks amid an economic downturn.