Fifty-three illegal migrants, including two babies, were dead or missing after a rubber boat carrying 55 people capsized off the coast of Libya, the International Organisation for Migration said on Monday. The boat departed from Zawiya on Thursday and then overturned off Zuwara on Friday, the IOM said in a statement, citing the survivors.
Zawiya and Zuwara are coastal towns west of the Libyan capital, Tripoli. "Only two Nigerian women were rescued during a search-and-rescue operation by Libyan authorities. One survivor reported losing her husband, while the other said she lost her two babies in the tragedy," the IOM said.
More than 1,300 illegal migrants have gone missing in the Central Mediterranean in 2025, according to the UN agency.
In January alone, at least 375 illegal migrants were reported dead or missing in the area following multiple "invisible" shipwreck amid extreme weather, with hundreds more deaths believed to have gone unrecorded.
"The latest incident brings the number of illegal migrants reported dead or missing on the route in 2026 to at least 484," the agency said.
In mid January, at least 21 bodies of illegal migrants were found in a mass grave in eastern Libya, with up to 10 survivors in the group bearing signs of having been tortured before they were freed from captivity, according to two security sources.
Another two security sources said two days after that, Libyan security authorities freed more than 200 illegal migrants from what they described as a secret prison in the town of Kufra in the southeast of the country after they were held captive in inhuman conditions.
Libya has become a transit route for illegal migrants fleeing conflict and poverty to Europe via dangerous routes across the desert and over the Mediterranean since the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi in a NATO-backed uprising in 2011.
Several states, including Britain, Spain, Norway and Sierra Leone, urged Libya at a UN meeting in Geneva in November to close detention centres where open-borders activist groups say illegal migrants and “refugees” have been tortured, abused and sometimes killed.
(Reporting by Alvise Armellini and Ahmed Elumami, Writing by Ahmed Elimam and Ahmed Elumami; Editing by Alex Richardson and Anil D'Silva)
