At least 20 migrants missing after boat capsizes in Mediterranean, seven survivors in critical condition

At least 20 people are currently missing in the Mediterranean. These migrants were trying to reach Italy from Libya on a makeshift boat.

At least 20 migrants are missing after a boat capsized in the Mediterranean near the Italian island of Lampedusa, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and the Italian coastguard said on Wednesday.

“Twenty people are missing in the Mediterranean after a shipwreck on September 1, according to survivors,”, wrote UNHCR's Chiara Cardoletti on X. “The seven survivors, welcomed by our team in Lampedusa, are in critical condition. Many of them are said to have lost loved ones” in the disaster, she said.

The Italian coastguard, for its part, reported 21 missing persons. They indicated that they had rescued in the morning, less than 20 km from Lampedusa, “a drifting boat, half submerged in water and about to sink, with seven migrants on board, all men of Syrian nationality”. This tragedy comes the day after a terrible shipwreck in the English Channel that cost the lives of 12 people.

3,000 migrants missing in 2023

Images released by the coastguard show these men in a very small boat, completely filled with water, sliding on a sort of inflated mattress towards the rescue ship.

“The rescued migrants said they had left Libya on September 1 with 28 people on board, including three minors, 21 of whom reportedly fell into the water due to bad weather conditions,” they said in a statement.

They also said they were continuing the search for the missing persons, including with the help of an aircraft. In 2023, more than three thousand migrants were reported missing after attempting to cross the Mediterranean, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

According to figures from the Italian Ministry of the Interior, arrivals by sea have fallen significantly since the beginning of the year: 43,061 people arrived in Italy between January 1 and September 4, compared to 115,177 in the same period of 2023.

20 days

Since far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's coalition came to power in October 2022, NGO vessels operating in the Mediterranean are theoretically only allowed to carry out one rescue at a time and must go “without delay” to a port immediately afterwards – a policy that prevents them from carrying out several in a row.

The NGOs believe that this violates maritime law, which requires any vessel to come to the aid of a boat in distress. Rome accuses the rescue ships of being a “pull factor”, even though in reality the vast majority of migrants arriving in Italy are picked up by the coastguard.

The Italian authorities decided on Wednesday to immobilize for 20 days the ship of the humanitarian NGO Sea-Watch on the grounds that it would not have waited for the green light from the Libyan authorities to rescue migrants. The Sea-Watch 5 ship arrived this Wednesday, September 4, in the Italian port of Civitavecchia with 289 rescued people on board, but will now have to wait 20 days before being able to set off on another mission in the Mediterranean.