An illegal migrant boat carrying around 35 people sailing from Libya capsized in the central Mediterranean, leaving one confirmed dead and two dozen missing, UNICEF country coordinator for Italy said on Sunday.
The rescue operation was carried out on Friday off the coast of Italy’s Lampedusa island by the Italian Coast Guard, which saved 11 illegal migrants, including four children travelling alone, and recovered the body of a pregnant woman, UNICEF’s Nicola Dell’Arciprete said.
The survivors and the body were brought to Lampedusa, while the remaining passengers remain unaccounted for.
The boat capsized after two days at sea, Dell’Arciprete said.
In a separate event on Sunday, two illegal migrants were found dead and 14 others were in critical condition when Italian tax police intercepted a boat with 85 people on board from Pakistan, Eritrea and Somalia, the AGI news agency reported.
The 14 illegal migrants in need of assistance and the two bodies were transferred onto two coast guard units 16 nautical miles off the Lampedusa coast and brought ashore to be taken to hospitals, AGI said.
More than 32,700 illegal migrants have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean since 2014, including an estimated one in five who were children, according to data from United Nations agencies, Dell’Arciprete said.
Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesperson for the United Nations’ International Organisation for Migration, said on Saturday on social media that at least 916 illegal migrants had died in the central Mediterranean so far in 2025.
(Reporting by Giulio Piovaccari; Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Louise Heavens)
