20 migrants missing after wrecking off Italy

Twenty migrants were missing in the Mediterranean after their vessel sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa, a senior official with the UN refugee agency said Wednesday.

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“Twenty people are reported missing in the Mediterranean after a shipwreck on September 1,” Chiara Cardoletti, the UNHCR official for Italy, posted on X.

“The seven survivors, taken in by our team on Lampedusa, are in a critical condition,” she said, adding that several of them had lost loved ones in the disaster.

Italy’s coastguard, which said they had rescued the survivors on Wednesday morning, said 21 people were missing.

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It said the vessel, found 20 kilometers (12 miles) off Lampedusa, “was drifting half-submerged in the water and on the point of sinking, with seven migrants on board, all of them men of Syrian nationality”.

“The rescued migrants said that they had left Libya on September 1 with 28 people on board, three of them minors, of whom 21 had fallen in the water because of the bad weather conditions,” it said in a statement.

It was continuing to search for those missing, with an aircraft helping with the operation.

In 2023, more than 3,000 migrants were reported missing after having attempted the perilous Mediterranean crossing from North Africa, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

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