At least 20 people have died after a migrant boat capsized off the southern Italian island of Lampedusa, a UN agency said on Wednesday.
More than a dozen are still missing. Survivors have been brought to a centre on Lampedusa. Details are still sketchy but Save the Children Italy say that a baby girl, aged 18 months, appears to have been lost in the shipwreck.
Around 100 people were believed to be on the boat, of which around 60 have been rescued.
Filippo Ungaro, from the UN's refugee agency UNHCR, expressed “deep anguish” over the disaster and said more migrants could still be missing at sea. “Twenty bodies have been recovered and the same number are missing,” he wrote on X.
Lampedusa Mayor Filippo Mannino said the shipwreck happened “presumably at dawn".
The Italian news agency Radio Radicale said the boat was carrying 97 people when it shipwrecked 14 miles south-west of Lampedusa. The Italian Ministry of the Interior did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It is not yet known how long the migrants had been at sea.
The boat, which had already overturned, was spotted from the air by a plane from Italy's financial police, it said.
According to the UNHCR, 675 migrants have died making the crossing so far this year, not counting the latest sinking.
In the first six months of 2025, 30,060 refugees and migrants arrived in Italy by sea, a 16 per cent increase compared to the same period last year.
The irregular migration route from northern Africa to southern Europe is considered one of the most dangerous in the world, with almost 24,500 people dying or disappearing on the Mediterranean crossing in the past ten years, according to the International Organisation for Migration.
Most of the deaths have been attributed to small boats setting off from the coasts of Tunisia and Libya.
The deadliest shipwreck off the coast of Lampedusa occurred in October 2013, when a boat carrying over 500 migrants from Eritrea, Somalia, and Ghana caught fire and capsized, killing at least 368 people. The tragedy prompted international calls for action to address the crisis.
